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the arcane kludges needed to produce popular web-page layout effects easily achieved using evil tables

Rejoice brother, for the era of display:table-cell has begun (supported in IE8 and up, and IE7 is effectively dead, thank god). Nice clean semantic markup, but now with access to all the juicy table features like vertical & horizontal-block centering, shared column height, and automatic column sizing. (Good article: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_about_CSS_Is_wrong/)

You know there's something wrong with a standard when Microsoft's broken box-model implementation makes more sense.

We now have the option to use this as well :) http://paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/ Again, supported in IE8 and up.

Especially on responsive/fluid sites (where you often want to do things like, "I want this column to be 33.333% wide, oh but I also want 10px of inner padding"), this is a revelation. Sure we could've used a wrapper div, but sometimes this is not an option, and either way it makes the markup cleaner.

Other IE8+ stuff we can now use includes:
- :first-child (but hilariously, NOT :last-child)
- multiple class selectors (.foo.bar)
- direct-descendant selectors (.foo > .bar)
- :before and :after (IE8 still has some minor bugs, but easily avoidable)

Here's the BAD news:

IE10 has removed support for conditional comments, and .htc (something like PIE polyfill is now impossible). Go ahead and try getting something like border-image (or even a reasonable fallback) working in IE10, I dare you.

the lack of 'constants' to set standard colours and measurements

You're of course correct that native CSS still has no concept of anything like that. This is where LESS or SASS come in. And with the power of mixins (ie, to easily generate all the browser prefixes for more advanced stuff like gradients, shadows, etc), it's getting borderline irresponsible to not use a pre-processor. I instantly switched to SASS when I discovered this: http://jakearchibald.github.io/sass-ie/. This technique, I am convinced, is THE way to write maintainable, sophisticated responsive code (with a good path to easily strip out all media queries for IE8) right now.

We could always count on WebKit being the universal web rendering engine across iOS and Android -- now, that will no longer be the case, and I guarantee you there will be instances where Google uses the inevitable differences between "Blink" and WebKit (which is also the core rendering engine for Mac OS X and Safari) for competitive advantage with Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android, al la Microsoft and IE... :-/

This is true already: there are visual and performance differences between different webkit browsers. WebKit is just a layout engine, whereas a full browser requires dozens of other components. WebKit for Developers provides a nice overview on this: http://paulirish.com/2013/webkit-for-developers/

For further insight into how webkit works:

http://paulirish.com/2013/webkit-for-developers/

No, he meant "//". http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/

I thought that at first too, but then I remembered this article: http://paulirish.com/2011/browser-market-pollution-iex-is-the-new-ie6/

Even with forced updates, the way IE is designed will not make things easier.

Products like Windows and Office have a lifecycle policy that typically runs 10+ years because that’s what these organizations need. As part of Windows, IE honors that 10+ year commitment.
~Dean Hachamovitch, IE Corporate VP

Basically, this means not only will you be supporting not only Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE, but the previous 9 versions of IE as well, all of which attempt backwards-compatibility and fail. Quoting the article I posted above:

The problem percolates when you come to terms with the fact that many of these modes are not the same as the original browser. For example:
IE8's IE7 mode: adds sessionStorage & localStorage, false positives on a feature test for the hashchange event, mishandles rowspan, and some other event and attribute differences.
IE9's IE8 mode: intermittently false positives on a feature test for inline SVG. Renders CSS differently than true IE8, and is crashier than the real one.

requires android 2.2 and flash 10.1

maybe gordon might help
http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

Gordon is a pure JS flash runtime. http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

What about Gordon? That one *is* open-source. Is it different from what TFS refers to in terms of goals (not current state)?

It claims to support SWF1 and a lot of SWF2. Right now I believe we're on SWF9, so there's a long way to go, but it does show that the approach works.

I used to use sIFR... but incompatibilities w/ IE and lots of edge-case use problems led me to switch. I was probably the most prominent bug-finder.

I switched to Facelift and even gave Cufon a whirl, but all of them had limitations that caused more trouble than they were worth when needing to build "pixel-perfect" site. Facelift adds too many HTTP requests (bad for HTTPS which can prevent caching). CuFon prevents text selection because it uses SVG, and can break complex link styling. All 3 are unsuitable for more than a line or two of text.

I've been switching over to @font-face for the last 4 months or so. It degrades nicely for older browsers, and if you set it up right it even works in old versions of IE. Try that with any other "cutting-edge" web technology. There are even services out there for creating all the necessary files.

Well, but SWF format is open, did you know that? You're free to do your own player today. In fact some people are trying now to run SWF files in HTML5 (effectively a player made using HTML5 technologies - see http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/ )
So your analogy is backfiring... if "text is open whyle AppleWorks is not", Adobe can say the very same thing: "SWF is open format, Flex SDK is open source, only Flash Player and Flash Pro are not".
As for Webkit being open-source.... it's the engine of Safari, right? Safari is not. open-source, right?
Now let's see... the engine of Flash Player is Tamarin. Flash Player is not open-source, but Tamarin itself *IS*.

What a surprise.... guess Adobe is just as open (scratch that, sorry, it's much more open... they don't restrict what you can and cannot run on their platform).

Yeah I thought they were gonna talk about this: http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

Gordon - An open-source Flash runtime in JavaScript+SVG

This will happen.
It is quite early, but i can bet this will be the future of Flash.
There are no (huge) changes needed on the website, just some simple instructions to follow and you just future-proofed your website. (that is if Gordon becomes a full runtime in JS. Cross your fingers and toes)

As JS becomes faster and faster each generation of browsers, it becomes a serious platform for development consideration.
This is what i am currently doing with 2 games at the moment, working on 2nd right now actually. This one will be much easier to get done and put up before the first one i started on. (MMO vs single player game(+stats... maybe))
Despite a lot of claims against it, "The Cloud" revolution is happening... again, but this time it is even more kickass and in your face than before.

I checked out the posted demos on my iPhone. Although they were a tad sluggish (particularly the star fade-in on the first demo), frankly, it wasn't bad. Some of the sluggishness could have just been because the demos are getting Slashdotted.

Personally, I'm a little more interested in PhoneGap, which lets you use JavaScript to create iPhone apps (outside the browser).

I agree with your premise, but many libraries, in addition to papering over browser differences, offer APIs that are more attractive than the DOM (for instance, CSS selectors, which are much nicer than element collection and node traversal).

Browsers are adding selectors, but javascript implementations have been available for ~5 years ( http://paulirish.com/2008/javascript-css-selector-engine-timeline/ ), waiting for the feature to be standardized and implemented at the browser level isn't something you can reasonably expect everyone to do.