Re: CSS priorities

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 10:01 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2014-01-20 at 00:18 -0300, Jens O. Meiert wrote:
>>  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).
>
> Although "obvious nonsense" is subjective I've seen features rejected at
> face to face meetings. But there have been many more - I doubt many
> people put much effort into remembering the paths not travelled.

At least half of what I come up with gets rejected.  Anyone who thinks
we throw in everything that anyone suggests has a *very* subjective
memory.  ^_^  (Or more likely, just doesn't realize the extent to
which the things they hear about are filtered, and thus subject to
selection bias.  Most ideas die after a single mailing list thread, or
only get thrown around informally or in person and never make it to
permanent W3C storage at all.)

> Sometimes features might be better put into markup, or (for Web apps)
> into JavaScript, and that push-back can happen too.

And does, regularly.  Lots of features I've proposed for CSS got
pushback, and wound up being done in a slightly different (better) way
in JS.  For example, my attempt to explain the underlying primitives
of Transitions and Animations morphed into the Web Animations spec
instead.

> The push for features is coming because people are suddenly using the
> "open web platform" for general-purpose computing, for all sorts of new
> applications and for older applications (such as making printed books)
> that weren't previously being done using Web tools and technologies so
> much.

Yup yup.  New use-cases drive new complexity.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2014 01:38:01 UTC