Re: CSS is doomed (10 years per version ?!?)

One small problem. No one implemented CSS 2.0. No one really even
implemented all of 1.0. My guess given those two data points: no one
will fully implement 2.1.

Maybe it's because I'm a usability guy, but I think try-out/revise
would be a better model for the development of these languages. Now
you're going to say that that's what you do, but I'm not talking about
the spec implementors. I'm talking about the language consumers. You
have to look to people who aren't familiar with the spec and the
spec's inner workings to try the thing out. Observe where they have
trouble and then fix it.

Orion Adrian

On 6/30/05, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Orion Adrian wrote:
> >
> > Avalong is a slightly different beast. It's also a 1.0 release. I expect
> > major new specs to take a long time, but I don't expect incremental
> > updates or feature revisions to take that long. Office comes out with a
> > new version every 1-3 years. While I agree that Microsoft could spend
> > more time with it's customers doing usability research, I still find
> > their process preferable.
> >
> > Remember GDI/GDI+ didn't exactly sit around while Avalon was in the
> > works.
> 
> CSS hasn't been sitting around either. We've resolved well over 900 issues
> in CSS2 since 1998. CSS2.1 just went to last call again, with the latest
> set of revisions. W3C version numbering is a little weird, but if we were
> to follow traditional numbering styles I suppose CSS would be at CSS 2.5
> (incrementing by .1 for each "minor" revision published since CSS2 REC).
> 
> We've also published plenty of other things, e.g. CSS3 Color (rgba(),
> opacity) and CSS3 Selectors (:nth-child, etc). Browsers other than
> Microsoft's have been slowly but surely implementing all of these.
> 
> You have to compare apples to apples. Big changes will take a decade.
> Small changes are occuring all the time.
> 
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>

Received on Thursday, 30 June 2005 11:14:31 UTC