CSS priorities

Tab, Working Group members, could you comment on focus and what plans
you have with respect to curbing feature creep and spec fragmentation?

I had responded with the following to Daniel’s transitions email, but
predictably that wasn’t very useful there:

[…] my point here, or wish, is that it would be good to focus CSS more.

I’ve brought this up a few times in the past but I really think we
don’t do anyone a favor cramming, pardon a bit of judgment,
*everything* into CSS. Variables/constants are a great example: They
should not have become part of CSS, and that not just because authors
never optimized their CSS well enough to discover that they don’t need
variables to fight complexity, but simply because anything like PHP
would do for this [1].

Complexity then is hard to quantify but I think CSS complexity has
just exploded because anything that’s asked for and “sounds good” is
added. I’m getting a little cynical maybe but I don’t recall any
feature being *rejected* here for about ten years (with the exception
of obvious nonsense). Now we have 300 properties (up from 53 in CSS 1
[2]) and are about to make CSS a programming language.

<snip>


[1] http://www.w3.org/People/Bos/CSS-variables
[2] http://meiert.com/en/indices/css-properties/

-- 
Jens O. Meiert
http://meiert.com/en/

Received on Monday, 20 January 2014 03:19:47 UTC