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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.'"
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.
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.