RE: Is There a Problem? (was: The Progress of CSS)

On Sat, 2 Jul 2005, Mark Birbeck wrote:
> > 
> > Each issue has to be logged, understood, discussed in committee, may 
> > have to have testcases created, user agents studied, and results 
> > tabulated, then a resolution has to be found, new text has to be 
> > written, edits have to be made, and finally changes have to be 
> > verified and reviewed.
> 
> No-one doubts the dedication and talent of you, of all people, Ian. But 
> I think the point being made by others on the list is that if something 
> takes as long as this, shouldn't we be seriously looking at the process 
> itself? [...]
> 
> So for me, the real question is whether large, monolithic standards are 
> the way to meet the needs of a web that changes by the day.

The CSS working group agrees, and indeed many years ago decided to split 
CSS into multiple modules to aleviate this problem.

However, we still have to maintain our existing specs. If people raise 
issues on CSS2 (as they have been doing) then we're not going to ignore 
them, as that would just mean CSS2 was useless as a specification.

Also, at the end of the day, I'm not convinced that it helps at all to 
have multiple small specs instead of one large spec. You still have the 
same amount of spec, and thus the same number of issues to deal with. In 
fact, having multiple smaller specs is IMHO worse since it confuses 
implementors, authors and spec writers (as we have found with CSS3).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 2 July 2005 13:02:56 UTC