Re: The Progress of CSS

On 07/01/2005 04:34 PM, Kris@meridian-ds.com wrote:

>Adam, your point is well taken.  But a couple points back at ya.
>
>The date carried by CSS1 is "W3C Recommendation 17 Dec 1996, revised 11 Jan
>1999"  That's a 2 year process from 1, to 2.1... this is developement, not
>implementation.  Again if we factor in IE's stagnateness for the last 4ish
>years, all these numbers make a bit more sense.
>
>As an addendum to that the date carried by CSS3 is "W3C Working Draft, 23
>May 2001".
>
>What's this say to me?  What is says is that the Consortium has multiple
>balls rolling at once.  They're offering the 3rd party developers (web
>browsers) the ability to implement "versions" all at once.  A web browser
>could advertise itself CSS 2.1 compatable, and we'd all understand what
>that meant.  Again, this has a LOT more to do with 3rd party implementation
>than it does initial development.
>
>I kinda feel we're jumping the gun here.  Just because it's taken a while
>to this point, doesn't mean it will continue to be abnormally long.  We
>just need to get all the 3rd party players to play nice.
>
Most of them already are trying to, with a notable exception or two.  
Additionally, a long time in between revisions is not necessarily a bad 
thing.  While it does not bring anything new to the table, it does 
"stabilize" the specification, and while there are things that can be 
improved, it is a fairly decent specification which many people are 
implementing and using.  It gives vendors something to target.  Were we 
up to CSS Level 6 or 7 or so by now, we'd potentially run the risk of 
vendors supporting varying amounts of each specification, which might 
have further fragmented the web.

Received on Sunday, 3 July 2005 01:59:12 UTC