Håkon Wium Lie

Håkon Wium Lie
Håkon Wium Lie, March 2009
Born	1965 (age 51–52) Halden, Norway
Occupation	Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software
Known for	Cascading Style Sheets
Website	Personal homepage of Håkon W. Lie

Håkon Wium Lie (born 1965 in Halden) is a Norwegian web pioneer, a standards activist, a politician for The Pirate Party of Norway, and, as of 2016^[update], the Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software.

He is best known for proposing the concept of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) while working with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in 1994.

Håkon Wium Lie attended Østfold University College, West Georgia College, and MIT Media Lab, receiving an MS in Visual Studies in 1991. On February 17, 2006, he successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo.

His PhD thesis is background to the origins of CSS and a rationale to some of the design decisions behind it – particularly as to why some features were not included and why CSS avoids trying to become DSSSL.

While working with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in 1994, he proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) As an employee at W3C, he developed CSS into a W3C Recommendation with Bert Bos. As a showcase and testbed, he integrated CSS into the Arena web browser. CSS is one of the fundamental web standards, with profound impact on typography, aesthetics, and accessibility on the web.