On October 10, 1994, Håkon Wium Lie published the initial proposal for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) while working with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. At the time, the nascent World Wide Web was structurally rigid and visually chaotic, cluttered with clunky HTML hacks to coerce raw hypertext into looking like print media. Lie’s radical insight was the clean decoupling of presentation from structure, envisioning a modular styling layer that could cascade dynamically across devices and user preferences. While generations of developers have since bonded over the shared trauma of vertical centering and specificity wars, CSS rescued the open web from proprietary document formats. It laid the architectural foundation for modern digital design, transforming a rudimentary network of linked research papers into the rich, responsive digital canvas we navigate today.