Where does the term 'layers' come from?

Often used to refer to divs

[grahamstewart]

I've noticed a lot of people seem to refer to divs as 'layers' or 'css layers' and this does seem to lead to some confusion, especially in those new to CSS.

Does anyone know where this odd term came from?
(I'm guessing it was probably some horrible drag-and-drop page designer tool).

Just curious.

[bcolflesh]

Macromedia Dreamweaver is probably responsible for the layer/div confusion.

it-enquirer.com/publishing/web-development/dwmx04-4.html

"A div in old Dreamweaver talk is a "layer", but we all know that's not right: a layer is a DIV that can move and the term was reserved for DHTML layers that were to replace Flash animated stuff. as DHTML has never become the success the W3C had hoped it to be, I for one would have thought Dreamweaver MX 2004 would no longer make reference to those Layers anymore. Alas, what was I thinking? Layers are prominently present in Dreamweaver MX 2004. They have their own palette tab called--very originally--Layers."

[Gibble]

<LAYER> was a tag netscape navigator used back in version 4.0. There was also ILAYER, and NOLAYER

<LAYER>
ID="layerName"
LEFT="pixelPosition"
TOP="pixelPosition"
PAGEX ="pageX"
PAGE"="pageY"
SRC="file"
Z-INDEX="n"
ABOVE="layername"
BELOW="layername"
WIDTH="width"
HEIGHT="height"
CLIP="n,n,n,n"
VISIBILITY="visibility"
BGCOLOR="color"
BACKGROUND="imageURL"
OnMouseOver="JScode"
OnMouseOut="JScode"
OnFocus="JScode"
OnBlur="JScode"
OnLoad="JScode"
</LAYER>

[DrDoc]

Yeah, I'd say NN4 is to "blame" for coining the term. The NN4 implementation of proprietary layers was the first true way of positioning things in overlapping layers.