Summary

  • CSS1, a W3C Recommendation from December 1996, ranked an author’s !important declaration above a reader’s !important declaration.
  • CSS2’s May 1998 cascade reversed that particular tie and explicitly connected reader priority to accessibility, including larger type and chosen colors.

Imagine asking a web page for larger letters and hearing back, politely typeset, that the designer had other plans. The argument was not entirely fictional. In CSS1, the World Wide Web Consortium gave authors and readers both a way to attach styles to HTML. It even described a reader’s personal style sheet as useful for human or technological handicaps. Then its cascade decided what happened when the two sides insisted on different presentations. A rule marked !important could outrank an ordinary rule. If both parties marked their rules important, the author won.

That small ordering mattered because the browser was an unusually intimate place for a standards fight. The author knew how the page should look. The reader knew whether the page could be read. CSS1 did give the reader’s important rule power over the author’s normal rule, and it suggested that a user agent might let the reader switch author styles off. The sharp edge appeared at the top: two important declarations, one property, different values. The author’s taste still held the trump card. A lovely shade of pale gray is less lovely when it makes the text disappear into its background.

In May 1998, CSS2 changed that ranking. Its cascade put a user’s !important declaration ahead of an author’s !important declaration. The specification calls the reversal a semantic change from CSS1. It also says why: this gives users with special requirements, including large fonts or particular color combinations, control over presentation. The reader did not gain the power to erase every design choice with every casual preference. For normal declarations, author rules still ranked above normal user rules. The decisive promotion belonged to the reader’s important declaration.

CSS2 illustrated the mechanism with a user style sheet demanding black text on white, with important declarations to keep those choices in place. That example did more than decorate a grammar rule. It showed how a reader could make a page usable when an author’s palette would not do. The word “important” now had two speakers, and the standard chose the one sitting in front of the screen when they collided. The author could still design a page; the reader could reserve an emergency exit from the author’s design.

The dates expose a useful truth about early Web standards. A Recommendation was a published decision, yet its own successors could revisit the politics hidden in a technical ordering. CSS1’s 1996 cascade and CSS2’s 1998 cascade were separated by little more than a year, but they assigned the final say differently. The change did not need a grand new interface. It needed the same punctuation mark, placed on the other side of a tie. In a medium that everyone could write for, the specifications made room for the person who had to read.