Opera CTO Hakon Wium Lie discusses the early (and future) days on the Web
Published May 12th, 2008 9:58 AM EDT By Daniel GoldmanHakon Wium Lie, the CTO of Opera, is in Prague now meeting with Web enthusiasts and Czech Opera community members. He sat down with folks at root.cz and talked about the early days on the Web and his work with proposing CSS.
It’s an interesting interview with Hakon, which mostly covers his personal involvement in helping the Web move forward.
What I found most fascinating about this interview was his early vision of HTML and CSS.
After Netscape introduced the <font> tag and “color” attribute, Hakon fought hard against it.
“However, Bert Bos and I felt strongly that HTML should not degenerate into a visual language. We wanted HTML to remain a semantic language so the content could be presented on all sorts of devices, not just visual ones. Therefore we developed CSS. So, in a way, you could say that CSS was developed to save an even more important language, namely HTML.”
This vision is very much still alive today, especially with the upcoming HTML 5.
(Read the interview with Hakon)
(Hakon Wium Lie on his OLPC laptop)
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Thanks for the interview link with Håkon…great stuff! Interesting to see how it felt to use the web in 1992. Webfonts will very cool. Nice to see Opera and Safari out front on that.
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When I was reading my feeds, I saw the title “Opera CTO Hakon Wium Lie di…” and totally freaked out until I actually opened it.
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The slides and other links are available, as well as, when/if I get around to it, a write-up.
The Prague Opera Web Appreciation Society holds meetings once a months, so when in Prague you know where to go. If you look at the above page you will also know when to go.
Planned events include voice, a WaSP Café, microformats, SVG, and more.