@brucel
Håkon Wium Lie
When I first proposed CSS, JavaScript was not around so I
couldn’t borrow it from there. Rather, the syntax was inspired
by X resources from the X11 Window System.
The reason for changing the CSS syntax from font.size to font-
size was twofold.
First, the hyphen makes it look more like
written English, which improves human readability.
Second, DSSSL and DSSSL-Lite used hyphenated property
names.
https://dev.opera.com/articles/css-twenty-years-hakon/