Quotes about CSS from the Zen of CSS design
and a few other places

Where it started - from 1994 news list
'In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me over the past year to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of people who want to -- strap yourselves in, here it comes -- control what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX, Microsoft Word, and every other common text processing environment: "Sorry, you're screwed."

The author of the message was Marc Andreessen, one of the programmers behind NCSA Mosaic.'
http://www.w3.org/Style/LieBos2e/history/

HTML and CSS
"HTML began its life as a simple language for tagging research papers. Browser vendors and graphic designers took one look at its lack of layout capabilities and gave it a great big thumbs-down. Tricks and hacks like <font> tags and the misappropriation of the table element were developed to overcome these limitations - hacks that underminded the very structural purposes for which HTML was developed in the first place."
page 11

An excellent example of "Don't Assume What your Viewers Know"
Always make things easier than they need to be. even though those with an interest in contributing to the Zen Garden should know how to download the sample files from these links (right-click the link and choose Save As), not everyone with an interest in studying the code does. Email still comes in asking how to save the files, which just goes to show that your target audience will always have unexpected members."
page 25

"Benefits of Web Standards

• Smaller File Sizes and Quicker Downloads
  Nora's Comments: the old font tags added a lot of code to your pages. Ex. <font size=4 color="#6633cc" face="Verdana, Arial, san-serif"><b><center>. These tags were repeated every time the font changed. Since the same style sheet goes with the page as a "dependent file," that file only has to be sent to a visitor's browser one time. The browser cache can hold it and use it on other pages.
• Increased Portability
  Nora's Comments: the part of a web page that makes it difficult to load on other devices is the positioning and images. The text just wraps. Here is a page without the style sheet: http://csszengarden.com/zengarden-sample.html the text can load in most any device that can receive it.
• Better Accessibility
• Precise Control"

pages 34 - 36