The document outlines the evolution of web design technologies in the 1990s, focusing on the development of CSS and Flash, which represented contrasting approaches to web presentation. CSS aimed to separate content from design and adhere to web standards, while Flash offered dynamic animations at the cost of adhering to these standards. The discussion highlights the complexities and commercial influences surrounding both technologies and their impact on web design practices.

1. Welcome To
Flash Web Development
CSS and Flash Bring Web Design to Life
The web was rapidly developing into a full-stack computing platform starting in
1993 with the introduction of online apps using CGI scripts. In 1994, companies
like Yahoo started utilizing Perl code to construct dynamic webpages, and in 1995
client-side interactivity was introduced with the introduction of JavaScript by
Netscape. Simultaneously, studies were conducted on the web's presentation side,
which led to the development of web design.
Though web programmers had some disagreements (ActiveX or JavaBeans? ), web
design split far more in the 1990s. Two very different (and artistically opposed)
approaches to web design were introduced in 1996, each represented by a separate
technology. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) served as the initial representation of
structure. The new language, CSS, was to be used to encode design components in
accordance with a W3C web standards Flash Web Development specification. The
main idea was to separate the presentation from the information, using CSS for
display and HTML for marking up content. On the opposite extreme of the web
design spectrum, Flash was an animation program that combined content and
presentation into a single file. In contrast to CSS, Flash was a proprietary product
that belonged to Macromedia, a single firm. Flash and CSS were actually very
dissimilar from one another; Flash was not an open source program, its source file
format (FLA) was not a proprietary format, and its output did not follow web
standards.
However, Flash had several significant advantages. First of all, unlike CSS, the tool
was simple to learn. Second, aesthetically, it was far more capable than CSS. With

2. Flash, practically anything was feasible; the only real limitation at the time was
the bandwidth available. Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, Flash didn't
depend on the top browser manufacturers to incorporate it, at least not for the
first few years. Users only needed to download the Flash player plug-in, which
was a browser plug-in. Which, collectively, they did.In 1996, CSS and Flash shared
similar objectives. In the mid-to-late 1990s, both sought to improve the condition
of web design on the internet. However, only one of them sparked a creative
explosion in terms of images. Note: I purposefully chose the phrase "killer
website" in reference to David Siegel's seminal 1996 web design book, Creating
Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design, which I personally
purchased. This book's original edition was published before Flash or CSS. It
promoted "hacks" to HTML to improve the visual appeal of websites, like table-
based layouts. It contained a chapter titled "A PDF Primer," but since the final
spec was still pending, CSS was not included. A new chapter titled "A CSS Primer"
took the place of the PDF primer in the second version, which was released in
1997. That is the speed at which web design evolved after 1996!

3. The business history of Flash is convoluted and lengthy, but we won't delve into
that. The real history, as seen through the lens of web development, began in
August 1996 with the release of Future Splash Animator, an animation tool by
Future Wave Software. Users may "create vector-based drawings and buttons and
then animate them" with the help of this "2D animation product for the World
Wide Web," according to the description.
Most importantly, the company's Java-based plug-in, Future Splash Player, allows
the drawings and animations to be inserted into HTML web pages. The player was
released "as a Netscape Navigator plug-in and a control for Microsoft's Internet
Explorer 3.0 ActiveX" for the two most popular browsers at the time. Thus, the
original version of the product that would become Flash consisted of two distinct
software components: an animation tool for web designers and a player, which
was a browser plug-in that would be used by end users to view the animation.
Jonathan Gay, a gifted programmer who had previously worked on computer
games and the 1992 graphics tool Aldus Intel Draw, was the main developer of
Animator. However, Animator was the project that brought him recognition; he
would later become Chief Technology Future Splash was lucky to receive early
adoption following its launch from well-known websites such as Microsoft's MSN
and The Simpsons. The official Simpsons website was created with Animator, and
it was reported on the Future Splash website in November 1996 that the site was
now "online." A video demonstrating its operation was recorded by the Web
Design Museum:At this point, Macromedia started to investigate. At the time,
Macromedia was recognized as Adobe's primary competitor in the rapidly
expanding online "multimedia" sector. It began in the CD-ROM industry in 1992
before making the switch to the internet in the middle of the nineties.
Macromedia's core authoring tool, Director, was complemented in 1995 with the
release of Shockwave, a web multimedia player. It came out in June of 1995. In
December 1996, FutureWave was acquired by Macromedia. FutureWave
Animator was referred to as a “low-end multimedia authoring tool” and Director
as a “high-end” tool in the CNET article about the acquisition. The story added

4. that "the plug-in will be incorporated into the company's family of Shockwave
players" and mentioned the renaming to Macromedia Flash. "Flash is attractive to
Macromedia because the files it generates are small and can be scaled across
different modem speeds," a Macromedia executive stated in a Wired report.
With hindsight, we can understand why a "low-end" multimedia tool like Flash
became popular in the following years: web designers found it easy to use, it cost
only $249 once Macromedia purchased it, and the browser was quick and
responsive.
CSS: Elevated Standards for Organization
Tim Berners-Lee and his CERN colleague Håkon Wium Lie were working on a
method to distinguish between display and content, far from the glitzy world of
multimedia. To remove stylistic code from the HTML code, a "style sheet
language" was to be developed. But this was hardly a novel concept. As stated ia
later W3C document, it was in fact a component of Berners-Lee's initial concept

5. for the World Wide Web: Tim Berners-Lee designed his NeXT browser/editor so
that he could use a basic style sheet to define the style. He did not, however,
release the syntax for the style sheets, believing that each browser should be free
to determine how best to present pages to its consumers. "A style sheet scheme
for HTML texts is proposed in this paper. A straightforward mapping between
HTML elements and display indications is provided by the suggested method. The
style sheet might recommend properties like font family and window size. It can
also offer logic to make presentation decisions based on the user's surroundings,
such as the screen size or the time of dayThe "cascading" feature, which allowed
for the use of many style sheets, each for a different context, was the true
breakthrough, though. Thus, style sheets would be arranged in an ordered list, or
cascade. Lie attempted to reconcile the web author's requirement to maintain
layout control with
Together with Bert Bos, Lie went on to write the CSS specification, which saw the
publication of "level 1" in December 1996. After a few years of revision, the
meaning of "cascade" had improved and the web designer had more influence
overall. "Authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a
personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps," was the
declared objective of level 1.

6. Snap Won. Before It Didn't
Strangely, despite Berners-Lee and Lie's declarations that web designers should
be in charge of layout, the browser vendors prevented it from happening for a
number of years after 1996 by either not supporting CSS completely or by
supporting it in different ways. This pushed a lot of site designers straight into the
arms of Macromedia Flash, which promised them complete control over layout.
Additionally, millions of users of Netscape and Internet Explorer added the Flash
plug-in after 1996. Due of the abundance of amazing websites created using Flash
at the time, it evolved into one of the most important plug-ins of that age.
It also took longer than expected for web designers to adopt CSS's structural
objectives. Lie afterwards stated in an interview that one of the main reasons for
developing CSS was Inadvertently, Lie had just shown the allure of Flash for
pioneering web designers: it was essentially an enormous animated picture file
that provided complete control over what appeared on a user's browser screen. It
was the antithesis of "good mark-up," but neither users nor designers seemed to

7. mind. Flash in a browser was lively, captivating, and entertaining. It made
everyone think of television, which was the mass entertainment medium before
the internet. Especially television programs like MTV that were popular at the
time. Apple wants developers to create native iPhone apps rather than cross-
platform ones, and it wants to replace Flash's function in Web video transmission
with the H.264 standard. While both of these objectives harm openness on the
web, they serve Apple's commercial objectives that underpin their closed iPhone
application platform. Gay was not incorrect to point out that Apple was pushing
iPhone developers away from the open web and into its own closed platform, but
he overlooked the fact that Flash was possibly doing just as much harm to the
latter. Web standards like HTML5 and CSS were being impeded by the lack of
semantics in Flash content. In hindsight, it is amazing that it got away with this for
almost fifteen years Still, we can also remember the past with nostalgia.
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