[yuhong]

In case of CSS, the important browser was IE.

This reminds me of DOCTYPE switching. From http://hsivonen.iki.fi/almost-precedent/: "Back when the Quirks Mode and the Almost Standards Mode were introduced ... committees created specs and that were enshrined as W3C Recommendations before there was solid implementation experience. Then the Web Standards Project lobbied browser-makers to implement the W3C specs as they were. The mindset was that the specs given from above couldn’t and shouldn’t change. People thought that vigorous upgrade evangelism would work and make Web authors change their existing sites."

Note that the Web Standards Project was also the one petitioning Netscape to cancel Mariner, which ended up contributing to the problem. Why did non-IE browsers have to implement document.all?