CSS WG Blog Resolutions 2007-11-05 2007-11-06 Boston P…

Resolutions 2007-11-05 2007-11-06 Boston Part III

Daniel Glazman brought up the 1998
List of suggested extensions to CSS
and how we haven’t been aligning our work with designer needs, even with the
feedback that we have already. This sparked a long conversation, which I don’t
think I can summarize, but I’ll try to pull out some of the points made here.
Note that these points aren’t representing WG consensus, just some ideas that
came up in the conversation: partly quotes, partly paraphrasing, partly
summarizing.

• We have not done a good job of considering user feedback.
• Some of the requests in the feedback were not pursuable for various reasons
  back when the feedback was given; others were simply not acted upon.
• We have some feedback in the “List of suggested extensions to CSS”.
  We should examine this list and see a) if the issues are still relevant and b) if we are ready to solve them
• We’ve been dominated by browser makers and need more user input, but
  we are not set up in a way that makes it easy to collect this information.
• CSS is driven forward both by pull from features specified by the CSSWG
  and by push features developed by implementors.
• Some ideas fly; others do not; we need to piece together solutions from the best parts.
• Where there is no champion for a spec, progress on that spec ceases.
• Interoperability is important to web designers.
• Good test suites drive interoperability. Wrong test suites drive
  interoperability on wrong behavior.
• We should solicit and respond to user feedback.
• We should use the CSS blog to collect feedback — but we don’t have that
  capability now — [various technical suggestions on what to do]
• We are happy for the CSS Eleven or any other group to gather feedback
  and process/organize it into something we can act on.
• We should document personas, use cases for what we’re trying to do.

Someone diagrams our efforts into the following sections:

• Readability (typography, fine layout)
• Printing
• UI / coarse layout
• Internationalization
• Foundation (e.g. box model)
• Programmability (making desired results easy to declare)

See also Kevin Lawver’s Web Standards’ Three Buckets of Pain.

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