CSS Eleven
Back in July 2006 I was pleased to announce that I had been asked to join the W3C's CSS Working Group as an Invited Expert; the only trained visual designer on the group. To be brutally honest, I have not yet contributed any way near as much as I would have liked to and I do feel somewhat guilty about that.
The majority of my time last year was spent writing and designing my book and this year my focus has largely been on reestablishing my design business. That said, I remain committed to playing whatever part I can in making sure that the third level of CSS meet the needs of visual designers who, like me, use CSS not only as a tool but as a means of creative expression.
One of the biggest challenges that the CSS Working Group faces in delivering future CSS is engineering solutions that meet the expectations of visual designers and developers. Neither existing floats nor CSS positioning were designed to accomplish the types of complex visual layouts that we now need from CSS. As our use of CSS has grown over the last few years, we have been forced to come up with clever workarounds to implement our designs with CSS. A brief browsing session through the archives of A List Apart, Position Is Everything, the CSS Zen Garden and countless blogs is testament to that.
I think that is fair to say that without the designers and developers who have come up with these solutions, and published them for us all to learn from, that widespread use of CSS would have stalled several years ago.
While designers have been twisting existing CSS in order to accomplish what their clients expect to see from them, work on the next level of CSS has seemed from the outside to be painfully slow. Many designers have already talked and written about their frustrations at what they see as an apparent lack of progress.
It's a tough job
Having seen the inner workings of the CSS Working Group first-hand, my eyes have been opened to the complexities of their specification development process and I have also been exposed to many aspects that I could never have imagined before I joined.
At the same time as developing ideas for columns and grid layout, backgrounds and typography (to name a few of the things on the group's to-do list), the working group also tackles internationalization issues, implementation issues, political issues with other working groups and the not inconsiderable fact that many of their members are representatives of competing commercial companies.
The challenge of developing the features that designers and others need from CSS3 in a timely fashion is extremely tough. It's a big job and an important one, especially for designers who need new and improved CSS features as our essential tools.
Communication
Communicating ideas and feedback to the CSS Working Group can seem like a challenge in itself. Many people have expressed their frustrations at how the group's mailing list operates and how their suggestions or comments have been handled. A common perception of communicating with the CSS Working Group is that the process is frustrating, that replies are often overly technical and that they often refer back to discussions deep in the mailing list archives.
There are already moves to change this, including a CSS Working Group blog and if CSS3 is going to satisfy the needs of visual designers as we move forward, new ways must be found so that we can better inform the CSS Working Group about these needs.
Priorities
We also need better ways to inform the CSS Working Group about our list of priorities for specification development. It is perfectly possible that the group's list of current work does not match the needs of designers and developers and this should be addressed as a matter of urgency.
Which do we need faster? Better selectors or backgrounds and borders? Do we need Multi-column Layout or Grid Positioning? New ways for us to communicate our needs to the CSS Working Group must be established and quickly.
Design focussed discussions
The job of writing specifications is a very technical task. Specifications are not intended as instruction manuals for web designers but as technical documents for browser makers and other software vendors. I know that as a non-technical person I have personally found many of the CSS Working Group's internal discussions very difficult to follow. I have also heard from many people that replies to their ideas and suggestions have also been quickly bogged down is what can seem to be overly technical discussions.
Designers need a better way to to point out areas where they feel that current drafts are lacking. For example, the current draft of the Multi-column Layout creates automatic columns without additional mark-up, but there are no plans to add styling to these columns. The Selectors module adds new nth-child selectors for styling alternate elements without additional attributes, but nowhere is it planned to merge the two to enable us to style alternate columns that are created using Multi-column Layout.
Most importantly of all, designers should have a way to explain and demonstrate visually to the CSS Working Group how they want new CSS features to work. For example, without visual, real-world examples the members of the CSS Working Group including implementer representatives of browser makers will have a tough time ensuring that Grid Positioning and Advanced Layout precisely meet our needs.
Time for designers to take a greater role
Having now had a small taste of how the specifications are being developed, I know that rather than sitting on the sidelines complaining about the apparent lack of progress or details of the new specifications, now is the time for designers to take a greater role. Ten years on from the birth of CSS, designers and developers who work with CSS should take the lead to ensure that CSS3 is not a missed opportunity.
CSS Eleven
Last year I was talking with a few of my friends who are designers about planned CSS3 features and the overall specification development process. It was widely felt that that both could be improved by designers getting together to work on what had already been proposed and honing those proposals to ensure that they contained solutions that met our needs.
We felt that if we could deliver to the CSS Working Group a set of concrete proposals, together with visual examples of how we wanted the features to work and code samples that might form the basis of test suites, that we might help the CSS Working Group do their work better and faster.
The idea took a back seat to client work and real life for a while and was rekindled by discussions taking place on various blogs over the last few months. So last week at the Web Directions South conference in Australia I announced the CSS Eleven. As it said on my slide (now with spelling corrected):
CSS Eleven is an international group of visual web designers and developers who are committed to helping the W3C's CSS Working Group to better deliver the tools that are needed to design tomorrow's web.
The Eleven are:
- Cameron Adams
- Jina Bolton
- Mark Boulton
- Dan Cederholm
- Andy Clarke
- Jeff Croft
- Aaron Gustafson
- Jon Hicks
- Roger Johansson
- Richard Rutter
- Jonathon Snook
What will we do?
Our job will be to build on the CSS Working Group's work so far by:
- Reading the existing design related draft specifications
- Adding to or changing the specification to better meet the needs of visual designers and developers
- Writeing in clear, non-technocal language how each feature is to work
- Making clear, visual examples of the desired final results
- Coding simple XHTML test documents
- Submitting our work to our peers and to the CSS Working Group
Our process will take each of the design related draft specifications as they currently stand, starting with the Multi-column Layout and by donateing a little of our time each month we will to read, write, design and code. We will initially do this in private before we publish our work online for one month public feedback. After stirring things around a little more and generally poking at it with a stick, we will pass on everything to the CSS Working Group for what we hope will be a smooth transition into a final result.
Which one of you is George Clooney?
Since Jeff Croft and Jina Bolton have already briefly introduced CSS Eleven and comments have raised one or two initial questions, I thought it might be timely to answer some of those questions.
So how is this group different from other groups that could try and acheive the same thing?
- CSS Eleven is just one answer to the issues facing the development of the next level of CSS. Taking the success of the Microformats initiative as inspiration, we hope to influence the W3C's CSS Working Group by suggesting practical solutions that come from our collective, real world experiences. Our work is intended to compliment and build on their existing work and we will work with them to ensure that they have everything they need to understand how designers need new features in CSS to work. Ours is a collaborative rather than combative approach and one that will be open for anyone to participate in to add comments, suggestions and feedback through our wiki.
Will the W3C working group listen to these eleven people?
- CSS Eleven is just one group of designers and developers who hope that we can voice our needs more effectively by working together than by working separately. I have discussed our plans with Bert Bos, chair of the CSS Working Group and he seems excited about what we have set out to achieve. The CSS Working Group is aware of the frustrations that many designers feel and I am confident that will not overlook the work that we and others are doing to assist them.
Aren’t all of these conversations about the drafting of new standards public for everyone to consume and respond to?
- Yes they are, and rightly so as I believe that it should be up to designers and developers working with the W3C and browser makers and implementers to develop future tools together. The simple fact is that many people including ourselves would like to see this happen more quickly and with solutions that better meet what we need as designers and developers. CSS Eleven is just one in what I hope will be a series of happenings that will help move CSS forward and in the right direction.
I really hope that ten of the world's finest visual designers and developers (plus me) focusing on each of the design related specifications that we can make CSS3 what we hope it can be.
Update
Update: Holding page now live at csseleven.com.
Posted on October 5th 2007
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Stuff and Nonsense is a small, but popular web design studio, founded and led by designer and author Andy Clarke. We started back in 1998 and have built a enviable reputation for creating highly effective web sites, ecommerce stores and web applications for our clients.
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