Håkon Wium Lie
The man who developed CSS
Here is a time line of Håkon Wium Lie's life:
- 1965 - Born in Haiden, Norway;
- 1991 - Attended Østfold University College, West Georgia College, and MIT Media Lab, receiving an MS in Visual Studies;
- 1994 - While working with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in 1994, he proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS);
- 1995-1998 - After joining W3C in 1995, he worked on the CSS specifications, including CSS1, CSS2, and RFC 2318;
- 1999 - He joined Opera Software in Oslo, Norway as CTO;
- 2005 - He launched the Acid2 challenge to Microsoft. Acid2 is a webpage that test web browsers' functionality in displaying aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs;
- 2006 - Successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo
- 2006 - He started campaigning for browsers to support downloadable web fonts using common font formats.
- 2007 - He started campaigning for the video element to make it easier to publish video on the web.
- 2007 - When Opera Software filed a complaint against Microsoft in the EU over Internet Explorer, he was a spokesperson, stressing the need for Microsoft to fully support web standards in their browser;
- 2008 - He was spokesperson for a group of technical committee members who resigned over the decision by Standards Norway to vote for the approval of OOXML;
- 2011 - He presented the video element in combination with the WebM format which Google had open-sourced;
- 2011 - Building on his experience with web printing, he proposed to extend CSS to support pagination on screens.
"Twenty years ago today, Opera’s CTO Håkon Wium Lie published Cascading HTML style sheets – a proposal. If Paul McCartney were a web developer, and writing ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ today, he would almost certainly write:
It was twenty years ago today
-- Bruce Lawson in his foreword on dev.opera.com to his interview with Håkon Wium Lie
That Håkon wrote a doc to say
That if the Web’s gonna last a while
Then we need a way to define style.
So may I introduce to you a way to add visual treats:
It’s Sergeant Håkon’s Cascading Style Sheets!"