The CSS Standardization Process

&quot;Later we also discovered that people didn&#x27;t want to replace CSS and rather wanted to make it bigger.&quot;<p>Ha.<p>Just finally got around to using css in something and it felt like the opposite of PEP 20.<p>I hope it gets better over time. Maybe you eventually get more of a feel for things like why svg behaves differently from all other images (except when the contents of the file tell it not to), or tracing where your inherited styles come from, or nothing you write being &quot;important&quot; unless you tag it that way, or figuring out how to make something dynamic and responsive but only relative to a series of independent constraints.<p>I&#x27;m sure there are masters of css who have grown to love it. And it seems like there are some good patterns emerging, grid is great. Overall though, I found the experience painful and bewildering. Maybe I&#x27;m just uniquely unsuited for that work, but I hope layout gets its Van Rossum or a &quot;css for humans&quot; movement someday.

SM-J700T (June 2015), Android 7.1.1 Firefox 68.4.2, 720x1280, minimum screen zoom and font size in settings<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;oJDfTOg.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;oJDfTOg.jpg</a><p>Maybe it needs initial-scale=1 in meta viewport? Anyone else getting this render?

When will we <i>finally</i> get a way to fix the aspect ratio of a div in a straightforward way?<p>Really, if you develop a standard for visual formatting, at least cover the basics.

Can we get &quot;2011&quot; added to the title?<p>I think it&#x27;d be interesting to know how the process described has evolved&#x2F;progress in the last ~9 years; is it still much the same? To give some context, CSS3 was &quot;released&quot; around 2011.<p>&gt; <i>the standard part is slowly growing, the part still in development has been growing as well, but should eventually diminish.</i><p>I&#x27;m also curious about this, the article seems to suggest that new features would become more standard several years ago..

I find it a bit ironic that the page isn&#x27;t being rendered correctly on Safari 14

Typography still has a long way to go. Generating a proper baseline rhythm easily would be nice

I guess the lack of comments could be interpreted as <i>uneasy silence</i> considering TFA is about justifying the bureaucratics of a &quot;process&quot; that never comes to an end, never produces a coherent final result, and puts sustained access to the digital information of two or more generations at risk.<p>Maybe someone should tell W3C it&#x27;s time to come to an end with CSS standardization (with only one and a half implementation left). If they feel like there&#x27;s not much anything more to do after 25 years of job security by inventing a thousand microsyntaxes, maybe they could start cleaning up their mess and provide profiles and formal specifications for at least core CSS specs such that, you know, coming generations will want to even consider maintaining their stuff. The precious few attempts at a formal semantics for even basic CSS box layout are certainly discouraging:<p>&gt; <i>Even for a seemingly simple language like [ours covering a fragment of the CSS box layout model], we see scenarios where constraints have a surprising or even undefined interpretation in the CSS standard and browser implementations</i> [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lmeyerov.github.io&#x2F;projects&#x2F;pbrowser&#x2F;pubfiles&#x2F;paper.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lmeyerov.github.io&#x2F;projects&#x2F;pbrowser&#x2F;pubfiles&#x2F;paper....</a><p>But maybe CSS is a lost cause at this point. I&#x27;m certainly more than open to a more formal (constraint-based or whatever) spec that covers significant portions of CSS (like GSS which seems abandoned however).