DigitalStyle was a small privately-held software company in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego, California

Rancho Bernardo, San Diego, California

Rancho Bernardo is an upscale master-planned community in the northern hills of the city of San Diego, California.-Geography:The topography of Rancho Bernardo consists of canyons and rolling hills...

. It was founded in 1995 by refugees from the failed software company Pages including Rick Gessner, Peter Linss, Greg Kostello, and James Hamerly. Additional talent for DigitalStyle came from a Xerox

Xerox

Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...

 spinoff Chrystal Software including Steve Clark, Beth Epperson, and Don Vale.

Its flagship product, WebSuite, was a leading web site creation tool in the late 90's. WebSuite provided advanced graphics and web page editing capabilities for novice authors, though it was also powerful enough for advanced authors. It was one of the first commercial programs to support PNG.

DigitalStyle was acquired by Netscape

Netscape

Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

 in 1997 due largely to their expertise in HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 layout and web technologies. James Hamerly became Netscape's vice president of the client products group. Rick Gessner became Netscape's Director of Engineering. Integrating with the existing Netscape client development team, this group contributed to the design and implementation of the Gecko

Gecko (layout engine)

Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....

 layout engine that powers many of the products under the Mozilla

Mozilla

Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....

 open source umbrella such as Firefox.