CSS 3 Selectors (O'Reilly) [LWN.net]

Russell Dyer writes about CSS 3 Selectors on O'Reilly. "Although the promise of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has been wondrous, the progress has been wanting. As with all W3C standards, there is the lengthy discussion process conducted by the related working group, then the problem of implementation by web browser vendors, and finally the unpredictable period of time for people to update to new versions of their browser. These steps can take a year or two each."

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CSS 3 Selectors (O'Reilly)

Posted Jun 26, 2003 7:45 UTC (Thu) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link]

Actually, for the last two steps - implementation of the standards by browser vendors and end users switching over to newer versions of their browsers - one to two years is a rather optimistic estimate from my experience. For example, internet explorer 6 is not able to view my web pages written in xhtml 1.1 / css 2.0, complaining about an error in the xhtml 1.1 dtd; this has been a published standard for more than two years, and others have told me that even xhtml 1.0 (a standard for more than 3.5 years) does not work correctly, although I haven't verified this myself. And as far as users not wanting to upgrade is concerned, I've got a friend who still uses Netscape 4.05 and stubbornly refuses to even consider using anything more recent (like Mozilla).

Combine that with the shortcomings of CSS (2, anyway), and it's not really hard to see IMO why no more progress is being made.

Slow-mo adoption

Posted Jul 7, 2003 23:06 UTC (Mon) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

The situation for PNG is even worse--sure, basic support showed up within a year or so, but MSIE for Windows still can't do alpha transparency correctly, and we're coming up on the 7th anniversary of its W3C standardization (less than three months from now). And because IE is the 800 kg gorilla of browsers, its lack of support means very few users are willing to chance it.

Thank goodness for monopolies and innovation, you betcha!

Greg