PARIS, FRANCE -- March 5, 1996 -- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at INRIA and MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science has announced a major step in building a coherent World Wide Web, the universe of hyperlinked information available on the Internet. As part of a W3C convergence initiative, Consortium members have agreed to develop a common way of integrating style sheets into the Web's hypertext documents. Participating members include: Adobe Systems Incorporated, America Online, Compuserve, Eastman Kodak Company, Grif S.A., Hewlett Packard, IBM Corporation, Matra Hachette, Microsoft Corporation, NCSA, Netscape Communications Corporation, Oracle Corporation, O'Reilly & Associates Inc., Reed-Elsevier, SoftQuad and Spyglass Inc. The style sheet efforts will be based on Håkon Lie's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) initiative, to be further refined by a group of experts within the W3C.
"Microsoft is pleased that W3C is driving the style sheets standardization efforts on the Web," said John Ludwig, Vice President of the Internet Platform and Tools Division at Microsoft. "We are fully committed to supporting the style sheets initiative in all of our Internet efforts."
"As the Web continues to expand, content developers will need the technology to accurately present their information to the broadest possible audience," said Jeff Treuhaft, Senior Product Manager at Netscape. "Style sheets will assure this presentation in today's cross-platform environment and we're very supportive of W3C taking a lead role in defining this technology."