Re: A heresy ?

* Philip TAYLOR wrote:
>There is no doubt at all that CSS-1 was a Good Idea [tm].
>CSS-2 added a great deal.  But CSS-3, whatever it will
>eventually be, seems to me that it is likely to be /so/
>complex, /so/ "all powerful", that few will understand it,
>fewer still will use it, and the great unwashed will
>remain in total ignorance of what they /might/ have been
>able to accomplish had the powers-that-be just "finished off"
>CSS-2 rather than trying to extend CSS to be all things to
>all men.

Could you clarify what you mean by "complex"? Is your concern that
CSS3 will contain too many features or that those features are not
designed well? Web authors want to style their web pages in certain
ways and using CSS2 certain things are either not possible or very
difficult to achieve using a lot of code, possibly combined with
bitmap graphics and scripting. Let's say you want to do drop shadow
effects, with CSS 1/2/2.1 you could study

  * http://www.alistapart.com/articles/onionskin/
  * http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssdrop2/
  * http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssdropshadows/

in CSS3 you could use the propsosed 'box-shadow' property, see
<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-border/#the-box-shadow>. Same goes for
rounded corners

  * http://www.alistapart.com/articles/mountaintop/
  * http://www.alistapart.com/articles/customcorners2/
  * http://www.alistapart.com/articles/customcorners/

In CSS3 you could use the proposed 'border-radius' property, see
<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-border/#the-border-radius>. I think
these make web authoring simpler rather than more difficult. I would
in fact not consider something difficult or "complex" as long as
simple things, or maybe common things, are easy to achieve. I do not
care much whether CSS provides 100 or 1000 features as long as I can
figure out how to achieve my goals quickly. I do not need to fully
understand 'text-kashida-space', 'kerning-pair-threshold', or
'word-break-cjk' when I am not interested in their effect. Likewise,
if CSS2 is good enough for what I want to do, I do not need to worry
about CSS3 at all. I don't necessarily think that excluding useful
features just to keep the feature set small is a worthy goal.

If there are features in the current CSS3 drafts that are not
sufficiently useful to be included in CSS3 then please name them.
Or be more specific of what you think the Working Group should do
in response to your comments.

regards.

Received on Friday, 21 May 2004 15:43:30 UTC