A new life for old standards?
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Revisions to HTML, CSS and others
Web Directions South, Sydney
September 27, 2007
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Also chartered to create a new combined format
(not yet made)
CDF is not a case either for or against the hypothesis. Defining a minimum set of things that HTML can be combined with is a very old idea. And CDF is still planning to create a new format (although it will be a format made by combining XHTML and SVG elements into one language).
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New level 2 better specified than the old
But no new features
New features are being developed and implemented
(as level 3)
Is it time to replace CSS?
If not, what needs adding?
Back in 1994, when Håkon and I started work on CSS, I expected HTML to last 50 years or more, but also expected CSS to not last longer than 10 years. I may still be right about HTML, but I severely underestimated CSS's potential. Still, we designed it to be extensible (more than HTML and XML) and 10 years after the first Recommendation, it still is extensible.
Although CSS has some parts that turned out less elegant than hoped (absolute positioning, in particular), and there are many bug in implementations, it seems those bugs and the existing features are not a hindrance to adding new features.
The question is more which of the many requested features to start with!
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Priorities depend on:
What is technically possible
Designers' wishes
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There are two slightly different different ways to define the grid, depending on your point of view. In the second example, you can either say there are three columns and the text has some padding; or you can say there are five columns and two of them are empty.
CSS will probably allow both views.
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Almost equal to CSS level 2
plus “marquee”
Developed with OMA
Final draft was planned for June
(we're a bit late)
There already was a Mobile Profile, a slightly smaller one. In fact, there were two, one by W3C and one by WAP (now OMA). The two were almost the same, but the fact there were two was confusing.
The new profile is the same for OMA and W3C. (Or more precisely, the new CSS Mobile Profile plus the WICD Mobile profile of XHTML together are equivalent to the OMA XHTML and CSS profiles, because some features that W3C put in WICD Mobile, OMA put in the CSS profile.)
One reason we're late is that the marquee properties aren't quite ready yet. They are based on a previous OMA specification, but that specification wasn't very precise and the behavior needed to be tight in with overflow behavior. Plus, marquee has to remain optional for desktop implementations.
Three parts and a common theme. The three parts: a small sample of work of W3C, a little more about CSS, and feedback from the audience on what W3C should work on next, especially in CSS.
The common theme: modify existing technology until it can't be modified any longer (until it breaks?), or design something better? W3C has responsability to think about the long term, but user demands are often short-term. And “user” in this case are not just end users, Web designers and Web developers, but also Web software developers.