[css3-ui] drop 'appearance' and related properties

The CSS3 UI module includes a section entitled "Appearance" (currently
section 5) [1].  The properties described in this section allow
arbitrary elements to mimic the appearance/fonts/colors of system UI
elements.

I don't see the need for these properties, they originated in an era
when "themed" system UI's were popular, based on the ability to control
system UI colors/fonts/appearance at a fine-grained level in Windows and
other windowing systems.  This begat lots of UI awfulness ("Look Mom,
all your windows with Halloween colors, wee...").  These days most
platforms have removed the fine-grained controls (e.g. Windows 7 buries
these and Windows 8 removes them entirely) and user agents generally try
to mimic the system-level UI for common elements (buttons, checkboxes,
etc.).  And HTML5 has expanded the number of controls available to
authors so there's less need to produce homebrew controls.

I realize both Webkit and Mozilla include prefixed '-xxx-appearance'
properties but I'm not sure I see the need to standardize these.  Given
the current diversity of UI's in use across desktop and mobile platforms
I think this is difficult to standardize in a way that would really
serve a worthy purpose.

I also don't see the need to add more system font names, since many of
these won't make sense in different contexts.  (And the CSS3 UI spec is
the wrong place to be defining the 'font' property since it currently
lives in CSS3 Fonts).

I think the WG should resolve to drop the properties and additions
described in this section of CSS3 UI before publishing a new draft.

Regards,

John Daggett

[1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-ui/#system-appearance

Received on Thursday, 24 November 2011 04:16:51 UTC