JavaScript Style Sheets

~ the eulogy ~

On 22 August 1996 Netscape Communications sent the World Wide Web Consortium a working draft called JavaScript-Based Style Sheets. The idea was in the name. The language had no rules and no declarations in it at all. You wrote JavaScript that reached into the document and set properties on it, so a heading became document.tags.H1.fontSize = "20pt". Netscape had the dominant browser at the time and good reason to think a proposal with its name on it would carry.

It did not. A rival effort had been running at the W3C since 1994 under Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos, and CSS level 1 became a Recommendation that December, four months after Netscape's submission. Microsoft had already shipped partial CSS support in Internet Explorer 3 in August. JSSS was never accepted as a standard and no browser outside Netscape ever implemented it.

Netscape shipped it anyway, in Communicator 4 in 1997, and went quiet about it almost immediately afterward. The company spent the rest of the version-4 era promoting CSS instead. When Netscape 6 arrived on 14 November 2000, built on the Mozilla engine, JSSS was not in it. Versions 4.0 through 4.8 are the entire run.

I got online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem, two years late to this argument and entirely on the receiving end of it. By then the answer was CSS and the only live question was how badly each browser implemented it.

~ the dossier ~

~ two ways to say the same thing ~

CSS gave you h1 { font-size: 20pt; }. JSSS gave you an assignment to a property on an object, inside a <style type="text/javascript"> block, and its tag names were case sensitive where CSS did not care. The selector vocabulary was thin. There were tag names and classes, and nothing resembling a descendant selector or a pseudo-class.

What it had instead was a whole programming language. A stylesheet could calculate and branch, because the browser was executing it, and that is why JSSS turned up in early dynamic HTML work. It is also what made it fragile. A page's appearance now depended on running an interpreter, so switching JavaScript off took the design away along with the behavior.

~ the part nobody expects ~

Netscape 4's CSS support was built on top of JSSS. The browser translated CSS rules into the JavaScript equivalent internally and then ran them, which is why turning JavaScript off in Navigator 4 also turned off your stylesheet. A generation of web developers spent years cursing that browser's CSS implementation without knowing that underneath it sat the language the standards body had declined.

~ the idea came back ~

Styling by writing code, with the full language available and the stylesheet computed at runtime, is roughly what the JavaScript world rediscovered around 2014 under the name CSS-in-JS. The implementations are better and the reasoning is different, since the modern argument is about scoping styles to components. The shape is the same, and the version that lost in 1996 almost never gets mentioned.

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