CSS WG - Pulling Back the Curtains

HI Everyone.

Seeing that I didn't get one challenge from my latest list message. I am either correct or what I said was totally irrelevant. But having no indication either way I can not be in any possition to know.

Here is a few extracts from Fantaisai' blog, "Pulling Back the Curtain: Opening up the CSS Working Group":

1. In my opinion, the CSS Working Group has been too dominated by browser implementors and gives too little weight to what web designers really want.

2. Recently the increased participation of Adobe (Steve Zilles), HP (Melinda Grant), and even Microsoft has helped a lot to balance the excessive bugwards-compatibility bias we had for several years, but we're still not aligning our work with the needs of the web design community as well as we should. It's not an easy problem to fix. We need more dialogue between the CSS Working Group and the web design community, but simply putting some web designers on the working group doesn't make that happen.

4. But I don't think adopting the HTMLWG model is the best way forward. Critical people like Boris Zbarsky (Mozilla) and Markus Mielke (Microsoft) have already commented that they can't keep up with the influx of mail there, and feedback from people like them isn't something we can afford to lose. Above all else, the spec has to be something the implementors can and want to implement.

5. The CSSWG doesn't need a radical restructuring to be more open. We have a structure that, IMHO, works reasonably well, and we have a working group culture that is internally pretty open, amicable, and flexible. What's missing is collaboration with talented and knowledgeable people outside the working group and an open, two-way, quality conversation with the web design community.

5.3 Keep editors' drafts in a public location so people can see our latest version and how we're attempting to address their feedback.

6. So we're slowly making progress on this front, and the main blockers right now are technical, legal, and temporal, not organizational. Hopefully by the end of the year we'll have set everything up and be working together with the web designers, implementors, and random techies towards a more inclusive CSS future.


The above was written on the 23rd of Jun 2007 (the rate of change is remarkable). I only have one question at this point. Does CSS2.1 have holes in it that are just so big that they are just being overlooked on purpose?

Alan

http://css-class.com/

Received on Friday, 28 March 2008 10:55:16 UTC