<Glazblog/>

Just a few minutes ago, I had a chat with a friend of mine about CSS, mozilla, microsoft, HTML and this sort of things normal people don't care about. I think a few things have to be said about Microsoft, things that people who discovered the technical side of the Web after 1999 might ignore:

• CSS is everywhere today because Microsoft - and namely Chris Wilson and few friends - believed in it.
• the contenteditable attribute was already implemented by Microsoft in IE 5.5...
• the filter property (extension to CSS) was implemented in MSIE 4 ! Well before the first SVG WD. Ok, the design of the thing is not nice and having to write filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Wave(... is.. well... ugly. But the CSS WG did not want to even consider the application of filters to content's rendering. We can now apply SVG filters to all content, including HTML 4, in Firefox but I have mixed feelings about the fact you have to know HTML, CSS and SVG to apply such a filter. Seems to me overkill, and too far away from the original spirit of the Web.
• the binding property comes from Microsoft too. Was the behavior property at that time. Long ago, Chris Wilson, Vidur Apparao (Netscape) and I (Electricité de France at that time) tried, in the so-called BECSS task force, to standardize bindings based on the Microsoft HTC and the Actions Sheets proposal by Netscape. In some sense, XBL is a descendant of the work we did at that time.
• IE has been having a zoom property in its CSS implementation since IE 5.5...

Don't tell me again nothing innovative ever comes from Microsoft, please. That's just false, and unfair. Fanatism does not help here.