A great post by Andy in response to the incredibly slow pace of innovation in CSS. Most of the CSS3 modules have been more or less ready to go for five years, and yet no browser really supports them. WTF? Andy suggests an interim CSS 2.2. Personally, I’m not as interested in interim solutions as I am in solving the core problem: why the hell must we wait five years in order to use the next version of CSS?
I left a long comment on Andy’s post detailing my thoughts — which include the suggestion that maybe Flash is the way to go, if the W3C and CSS can’t keep up.
001 // Baxter // 05.06.2007 // 10:04 PM
As I see it, the lack of movement on the CSS front is the same as the lack of movement in HTML… the W3C is broken. I won’t pretend to know what went wrong, and I sure as hell don’t know how to fix it, but something has gone awry.
I’m not sold on Flash as the answer, either, although I certainly understand your frustration and why you would cast a wider net for a solution.
In some ways, I almost miss the old browser wars, when NS and IE were happy to adopt ANYTHING that could provide some leverage against the other guy. CSS support, XHR, whatever. At least the pace of new development was fast and furious.
I’m just pessimistic these days. People - from w3c to browser vendors on down to the man on the street - seem to have settled into a comfortable “good enough” view of what a browser should be and can do.
I figure the best chance for real movement would be if Safari and Mozila were to give a big “fuck you” to Microsoft and jump forward with support for big chunks of CSS3, whether they’re in release candidate, final, whatever. Again, shades of the browser wars, but until someone says “we’re going to run with this, and someone else is left playing catch-up, I fear we’ll be stuck with the status quo.
002 // Jeff Croft // 05.06.2007 // 10:24 PM
I mostly agree with you, Tim. It’s a bit of a catch-22. If the browser makers innovate, things suck for us because not all browsers work the same. If they don’t, things suck for us because we never get any new toys to play with.
Bummer.