RE: The CSS Problem


[Liam R E Quin:]
> 
> My own feeling is that the CSS WG needs to split into task forces, since
> magazine publishing, application development, ebooks, hypertext documents
> and Hollywood Hypermedia Infotainment/Brainwashing all have close overlap
> and yet distinct needs. But that's my own feeling, it's it's very clearly
> not generally agreed in the CSS WG.
> 
I don't think there is necessarily much opposition to this in principle. In
practice we remain in a situation where the same small set of people would
have to be involved in all the TFs to achieve progress. The WG may be large
on paper but expertise - and editor time - remain very deeply concentrated. 
In such a context adding layers of distribution may turn out to be both 
artificial and an additional burden for most areas. 

I wouldn't mind trying that approach but I expect there would be practical
concerns at the short-term costs of this. 

As to the general topic, CSS cannot become smaller as the web platform enables
more and more scenarios. It is bound to grow and managing the growth of a 
successful standard is a fine first-world problem to have (if you like things
to stay the same how about XHTML2?). So I don't really care about the absolute 
size of CSS or anything else as measured by arbitrary metrics such as the
number of properties or specs. Actual adoption by implementors and usage by
authors are the metrics I believe to matter most. (And I'd love to hear from 
others about the acquisition and sharing such data)

As for those who worry CSS may grow so large people can't hold it in their 
head: we passed that point a while back.

Received on Tuesday, 13 November 2012 16:42:49 UTC