Excellent thoughts, you’ve managed to eloquently explain some of the issues I have with CSS.

I think that we were so excited to have something to champion (web standards) that we forgot to notice its glaring flaws before the technology became too embedded.

I really do hope that the authors of these standards pay attention to these kinds of posts rather than simply dismissing them as examples of insignificant edge cases, unfortunately I’m quite skeptical. Too many reasonable complaints and requests have been shot down on the grounds of not being worth the additional complexity.

Just enabling the full expression of typography on the web and doing nothing else would be a huge boost for the presentation of the web.

Small typo: s/more so that the/more so than the/. Feel free to delete this comment after you fix it (-:

This problem is yet more evidence of the fact that CSS was put together, in very large part, by engineers, and not designers. It’s my experience that the folks behind CSS are *still* not really listening to designers when it comes to CSS wishlists and the like. It’s bummer, and one we have very little control over. Also, given the relatively long measure and reversed out text, I’d say the textarea I’m currently typing in needs a little more lead. ;)

— Ed says: Consider it done my friend.

> Srsly, much more important than any of this is that browsers get around to properly supporting typeface embedding.

It’s a good point. Proper support for @font-face across all major browsers, as well as cooperation from font foundries, would effectively make this issue moot.

Great point, Andy. I wonder if some FontAvailable-powered, dynamically written CSS might yield the same certainty as specifying type via @font-face.

Of course, you’d need a bunch of conditional statements (if Baskerville, line-height = 1.618; if Georgia, line-height = 1.7; etc.).

CSS has fair few holes that are obvious if you’re a designer. As Jeff Croft points out, it’s because the CSS group is a bunch of engineers with nary a designer among them. I’ve ranted ‘till I’m blue in the face about this very thing, as have many others, yourself and Jeff included. Never makes a scrap of difference. Which is why I’ve not blogged anything CSS related this year. What’s the point? No one with any power over the spec is listening. And those that do hear our protests just put their fingers in their ears and scream “lalala, I know best! You don’t need it, you’re just a designer”.

It’ll be nice when the whole font-embed issue is solved and makes this problem redundant. I imagine font-embed will get fixed far sooner than correcting an inherent problem with CSS. As usual. Shiny new things get priority over fixing broken implementations (here’s another pet peeve: background-position has to re-set X and Y. Which is bloody annoying when all you want is X - like, oh i don’t know, for _hover states_).

Andy moan away. I’ve largely stopped bitching about CSS’s problems in despair of them ever getting fixed. The W3C’s so ineffective as to be actively a problem. They’re in my way. Roll on browser vendors taking control out of the W3C’s hands: a-la -webkit-transition etc.

Last reply.

font-size-adjust WAS in CSS2. Then got ejected in CSS 2.1. By engineers.

Says it all. http://dbaron.org/log/20080613-firefox3-css#font-size-adjust

Hello,

First, as mentioned, font-size-adjust solves some of the mentioned problems. It’s not in CSS 2.1 mostly because there was no sign of it getting implemented in the short or even medium term. CSS 2.1 removed a lot of such unimplemented properties, which then divide in two groups:

- the ones that were badly designed (removed);
- the good ones (pushed to CSS3).

Font-size-adjust was pushed to CSS3.

Re: the W3C processes and the impression they don’t listen to designers,

1. The last time i heard the W3C CSS WG’s co-chair Daniel Glazman speak publicly, he insisted that they needed input from designers. And asked for such input.

2. What group of designers, or recognized experts, submitted propositions to the CSS WG using the appropriate communication means (the WG’s list, for instance)? Posts on designer blogs will most probably be ignored because… well, you have to submit your input, not put it on your blog and hope that someone from the WG will read it, submit it to the WG, defend it, etc.

3. Is the input that some designers submit (if any) organized, with propositions and arguments? “It’s broken, i wish we had this instead” is something, but it’s not much.

4. The W3C working groups tend to listen to a) organized groups and b) recognized experts. Since they’re mostly engineers, they may not know perfectly well who is a recognized webdesign expert. So the solution is: organized groups.

You know what to do: work with several people, create a proposal, submit it.

@Florent

That’s an approach that’s been tried too, and it doesn’t work. My anger comes from extreme frustration, and it’s not because of a lack of effort on my part, or the part of designers in the industry. Take a look at my critique of the WASP Community CSS3 Feedback: http://mattwilcox.net/archive/entry/id/1031/

This is old ground. No matter if we write on our own blogs or fumble around in the strange hoops, disjointed blogs, and antiquated systems the W3C claim are “open dialogue”; designers are ignored. Engineers refuse to understand. Bert Bos continues to argue against 10yrs+ of sustained demand because, well damn, the stuff we want might be hard to achieve.

I don’t care. We need fundamental changes to CSS. The difficulty of implementation isn’t a designers problem. That’s an engineering problem. Doesn’t change the fact we still need things CSS doesn’t offer and which just get dismissed time after time.

Look at Andy himself, he was on the CSS WG and quit. Because it’s not workable. Because the CSS WG, to all intents and purposes, from outside AND inside, is a closed system where designers have too little influence, and stuff get politicized to death.

Anyway, the CSS WG is for now largely irrelevant. But that’s a whole other blog post I wrote and never published. Why? Because I realised I was raging against an indifferent, impotent, and irrelevant nothingness.

It doesn’t matter if a magic wand was waved and CSS3 got all the stuff we want. Math, variables, DOM traversal & inspection, and all that jazz I’ve been banging on about for over two years! Because the implementation into browsers will take at least 5yrs to become relevant to designers, and until any CSS3 attribute gets cross browser support in 90%+ of site visitors, we can’t USE them. Certainly not for layout.

The future of CSS layout and display is not going to be decided by any WG. It’ll be decided by browser vendors who implement stuff they come up with after listening to designers (transitions, transforms, font embedding, etc), and for the next few years, it’ll be all about JavaScript patching up display problems because CSS can’t do what we want. I hate that, but that is exactly what is going to happen: we’re going to rely on JavaScript for display. It’s already happening.

“@Matt”

Best read I’ve had all day. Preach.

Matt, i read your post and it looks like a good illustration of what i was talking about: feedback on a blog, that reflects your opinion (though comments show that others share this opinion or parts of it), that criticizes the CSS WG’s decisions and attitude, and hints to what you would like to see instead.

What’s missing here?

1. Organized, community- or committee-base input.
2. Detailed propositions with use cases, dummy code examples, description of effects.

You replied “This approach has been tried before”, but don’t offer a decent example of that. (I’m not saying that your article is not valuable, mind you.)

You highlight the requirement for use cases when quoting fantasai’s responses to community feedback, but don’t comment on that. Is that a way to imply that such a requirement is bogus? My take on this would be: if they need use cases (and i understand why they would), some group of webdesigners should work on use cases. My opinion is that the Web Standards Project’s request for feedback was flawed and incomplete, since it did not encourage quality submissions that would strongly make a point.

Time to do it again, but properly?