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CSS 2.1 Becomes W3C Recommendation
yuhong writes "After about a decade of development, CSS 2.1 has become a W3C recommendation. From the announcement: 'The current interoperability makes it easier than ever for developers and designers to enrich the toolkit. W3C expects future additions to CSS to be organized as independent modules, allowing smaller, more focused feature sets to progress and stabilize at their own pace. Some of these new features are already supported in browsers and other software in draft form (using the built-in CSS prefix mechanism designed for experimentation). As interoperability improves for each one, developers can transition to the standard to simplify their code. The CSS Working Group also publishes snapshots of which CSS features are supported interoperably in browsers; see, for instance, the most recent CSS Snapshot.'"
This is a quote from wikipedia, which might explain why CSS 2.1. is only *now* part of the recommendation:
The CSS Working Group began tackling issues that had not been addressed with CSS level 1, resulting in the creation of CSS level 2 on November 4, 1997. It was published as a W3C Recommendation on May 12, 1998. CSS level 3, which was started in 1998, is still under development as of 2009. In 2005 the CSS Working Groups decided to enforce the requirements for standards more strictly. This meant that already published standards like CSS 2.1, CSS 3 Selectors and CSS 3 Text were pulled back from Candidate Recommendation to Working Draft level.
Even so, what has the W3C been doing the last 6 years!?
And while they are so slow finalizing the CSS standard
That's not a bug, it's a feature. The W3C, despite what some people think, is not a kind of "web government" that sits above browser makers, website designers etc. and tells them what to do. Rather, its purpose is to make the standards that the community has agreed on official.
This does mean that the W3C will have working groups staffed with industry officials and experts to work on those standards, yes; but it also means that a standard will only be finalized when it is, well, a standard: before that, the specification is there for everyone to adhere to, but it's still a draft - a proposal.
It helps when you think of draft standards as RFCs. In fact, that comparison is particularly apt insofar as that the IETF also published STDs, which are the ACTUAL standards (e.g. STD 5, also known as RFC0791, which describes IPv4).
Think about it.
There is: http://code.google.com/p/ecss/
The thing I dislike about these CSS extensions is that they all have different syntax and require a specific language/method
It would be great if one of these would run as an apache module, php/perl/python/ruby script, javascript, java/C# library, etc.
W3C does a great job, but they seem to go for semantical perfection instead of practical use.
Pet peeve: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-color/#css2-system was deprecated in favour of http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-ui/#appearance. Nothing wrong with "appearance", but neither can do what the other can. If I want a HTML element to have the appearance of a button, I'll make it a button element. If I want to make a tri-state checkbox with the look and feel of the OS, I can't. Why not have both?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
There is a difference between which standards has 'Recommendation' level, and which ones are recommended to use. CSS 2.1 has been recommended for a long time, it is just not a 'Recommendation'. Just like RFC standards doesn't actually want your comments.
For which CSS specifications that are recommended. Check out CSS Snapshot 2007 , and don't worry about the 2007 name, the latest version is from May 2011.
Well, without doing any calculations I suspect that the cost to the user in terms of CPU cycles in negligible compared to some of the Javascript and massive (X)HTML documents sent these days.
Not to mention that it should with some optimization be possible to cut down on the parsing required (since the browser only has to parse the '$bluebg' block once as opposed to parsing say, 300 different 'background:#00f;' statements).
And the maintenance wins are potentially enormous (with a custom server-side setup you are using a custom non-standard solution which can be a maintenance nightmare).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Nobody is required to use these new technologies. HTML 3.2 and tables will still work as well as it ever did, so anyone can still do it All that's changed is that there are more advanced capabilities (out of necessity/efficiency requiring more stringent adherence) for those who want or need more. This is inevitable and essential to allow the Internet to grow beyond a collection of multi-coloured fonts on garish backgrounds with a couple of animated GIFs for decoration.
Even then, for those who want the capabilities and elegance of modern technologies without the complexity we have all manner of CMS systems lowering the knowledge bar to allow non-technical users to create visually and technically stunning websites.
I disagree very much with your assertion. The progress of Internet (pseudo-)standards hasn't prevented anyone from creating from creating a website, in the same way that watercolours don't prevent a child playing with finger-paints. Just don't expect your kid's painting to look like a Van Gogh.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Ok, I know I'm gonna be modded as "Troll", but I need to say it: CSS is an horrible, backward, overly-complex standard. And yet, for philosophical / ideological reasons, it has been branded by the semantic folks as one of the most exciting innovation of the 20st century.
CSS has been invented in the days when most web pages consisted of simple blocks of text, with an occasional image floating left or right of it. All that was needed back then was changing the color of text, adding margins / paddings and that's about it. It was NOT designed to handle complex layouts: for that, you used tables.
And then the semantic folks arrived and told everyone using tables was baaaadddd for their main purpose was to present tabular data, not to layout things. And they were right, of course. But they made the wrong choice, deciding to extend CSS rather than crafting a new standard, specifically designed for the task. And here is the result: more than fifteen (15) years later, we still can't do simple things like "aligning this block to the bottom of this one" without using dirty - not semantic at all - hacks, or even falling back to JavaScript.
Even CSS 2 isn't supported properly by some browsers. Let alone CSS 3. And while you may think it isn't W3C's fault, I think perhaps, if some of the richest companies in the world haven't been able to implement this standard properly in, say, 10 years of continued effort, and that standard doesn't even reproduce all of the basic features that have been used in print for decades, it *might* be overly complex to get right. Look at these stupid cascading rules, for example: who seriously wants that ?
We need to move forward and develop new standards, focusing on /features/ rather than on pseudo-philosophical crap. We want to design websites that look great. Period.