RE: CSS Charter (Apple's Wishlist)

Hi,

I have been reading the public www-style mailing list since the fall of
2006. In my case, the specific purpose has been to monitor the development
of the CSS3 @Paged Media specification for a government agency project where
I am acting as a printing literate sub-contractor.

One of the areas where I believe the group seems to currently be
experiencing conceptual difficulties is with the impact on CSS of the
architectural changes that the world refers to as "Web 2.0".

Specific to my expertise with printing, I see no reason why in the future
CSS could not elegantly handle the styling of a print stream being returned
to a UA driven by a request from that UA to create a report, which now can
be handled totally within the "Web Realm" as the old boundaries of what
constitutes an application server and what constitutes a web server sort of
all merge into one.

As best I can tell from reading the list, this belief runs counter to the
strongly held CSS concept that CSS is "only" for styling presentation and
not for content.

I'm afraid the world is changing the boundaries within the Web protocol
space of what constitutes presentation and what constitutes content and CSS
needs to begin to decide how to remain current within this new reality.

Therefore I believe the group should focus equal attention on the "not done
yet" and the new "cool" stuff to determine what items need to be added into
CSS in the near term future to keep it relevant to web developers and web
service based consumers. 

My personal opinion is the strong push that frequently appears in the public
list, to have CSS remain true to the old definition of presentation, is
actually making CSS less and less useful and relevant as we go forward.

Best Regards,

/Paul
--
Paul Tykodi
Principal Consultant
TCS - Tykodi Consulting Services LLC

Tel/Fax: 603-343-1820
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf
> Of David Hyatt
> Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 4:57 PM
> To: Paul Nelson (ATC)
> Cc: fantasai; www-style@w3.org
> Subject: Re: CSS Charter (Apple's Wishlist)
> 
> 
> On Mar 25, 2008, at 3:45 PM, Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote:
> 
> > I would like to push back and ask why new "cool" things should be
> > considered for addition to the charter when we have core pieces that
> > are not completed yet.
> >
> > Perhaps with each new "cool" piece there should be a commitment to
> > first finish one core piece of the standard. That way we can have
> > the core pieces finished along with getting the new "cool" ideas in.
> >
> 
> So Microsoft can propose cool new ideas like:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-css3-grid-20070905/
> 
> ...and have them worked on because they happen to fall under the scope
> of the current charter?
> 
> However when Apple proposes something that happens to lie outside the
> scope of the current charter, your response is "No! We shouldn't do
> that!"
> 
> While I can understand that your engine is struggling to play catch-up
> after years of neglect on your company's part, that's no excuse for
> holding the rest of the Web back.  Some of us have largely completed
> CSS2.1 and would like to see CSS improve significantly in the coming
> years.
> 
> Finally, Silverlight implements many of these ideas and is being
> pushed for use on the Web.  I guess "cool" is ok when it's part of
> your company's proprietary technology stack.
> 
> dave
> (hyatt@apple.com)
>

Received on Tuesday, 25 March 2008 21:23:20 UTC