I really hope you were kidding about letting this evolve bottom-up. That’s why we now have to use all the hacks we have. More what you are proposing really comes down to all the browser developers agreeing to merge into one organization with one browser that we will all use. Then we can develop bottom-up, because everyone will be on the same platform. The other option is to treat each browser as a separate operating system and write ports for each browser, which in fact is just a much longer version of using hacks.

I also agree with shmlco, that such a drastic improvement to layouts as what is proposed is unnecessary, though potentially nice. If we could just declaratively stretch an element to fill its containing element, the problem is solved for 90% of all issues. I’m not sure how many people need or want to wrap text to multiple columns. It would certainly be a nice option, but that really falls more in the realm of print rather than online media.

to clarify my previous statement regarding css support in IE, many corporations unfortunately are still using IE 6. I’m honestly not sure about IE 7. But in IE 6 and the latest version of Opera, one thing that bugs me a little is the difference in margins and padding with ordered and unordered lists compared to how Firefox, Netscape, and Safari threat them. I generally have to find an easy medium, especially when I’m using pictures as bullets.

Also, the child selector is not supported by IE in versions prior to 7.

I know in most situations this wouldn’t matter, but I’ve been working on a web site lately for a major corporation who is still using IE 6. Of course, their web site is still HTML 4.01 Transitional too and seriously bloated with code.

Because I’ve been testing the new pages in IE 6 and Firefox 2(since that’s what they use), I’ve not had a chance really to examine the pages in IE 7. I would hope that Microsoft IE has come a little further and I understand that Microsoft is now being more responsive to developers. I just hope that in the future, while they are “taking many roads less traveled” with new technology, they will still support the technologies that other browsers are supporting instead of waiting 5 years later to finally fully support PNG graphics.

Sorry if I was a little unclear earlier. I hope this is a little more specific.

Joshua Davis
Deserted Road Studios

In establishing a new set of standards unless all browsers are at the table with the good folks at W3C and a goodly number of working folks (instead of rarified intellectuals who are more concerned with wording as opposed to working) there won’t be any real changes initiated, at least not any time soon. When they want to get real and give us things like 3 column layout grids, opacity that works in all browsers and containers that don’t threaten the box model then once again will I bother to get interested in re-learning what by all rights should be an excellent tool for the whole of us as designers…

As one consequence of this evolution, there are lots of nicely implemented WYSIWYG programs available that build crappy non-compliant code (by which I mean mainly that it fails to separate style and content, even if it does technically comply with an older standard). We’ve all seen the results, and experienced the headaches of updating such code.

To qualify as a standard, any new iteration of HTML and/or CSS must be adopted and fully embraced by all browsers. That means the browser developers must participate fully. I don’t know to what extent this is being done now, but I know that Microsoft went off on its own merry tangent for a long time and tried to bully us all into adopting its proprietary ideas. That can’t happen, and I think now Microsoft has come around somewhat (their various tools still generate the most bloated and ridiculous code I’ve ever seen).

I’ve participated in a few W3C working groups, and in my experience the folks at Opera are very involved and very astute. If there was similar commitment by Microsoft or Safari or Mozilla/Firefox folks, they didn’t identify themselves as such.

My point is that W3C needs a process that mandates the full involvement of all major players. Only then will we have confidence in learning (again) a better way of doing things. It doesn’t do much good to invent a new language if the people you want to communicate with don’t understand it.

if you had a site that would make a couple bucks for each visitor you’d probably bend over backwards to accomodate and then say … is there anything else i can do for you?

It is always us web developers who end up having higher workloads, due to these incompatibilities. It’s costing our clients, who end up having to pay more for their sites due to extended development times, yes i know they are also the ones pushing to make it work on IE and the crunch is they will go somewhere else if you dont give them what they want! So again we just end up taking it.. and Browsers like IE keep getting away with a sub-standard product that we have to make pretty for them. If this was a factory, with unions etc, there would have been a strike for unfair working conditions years ago! If there was a strike, the client (customers) would have suffered at the same time, it is at that point that the factory realises they have to change their way in order to get their workers back, and keep the clients happy! We seem to have no such recourse! We are often small companies with a few developers who need to keep our clients just to survive.

I would like to know how much it costs us and our clients in extra development time. How many man hours are wasted due to standards compliancy issues. Why can’t the major browsers decide to use one rendoring engine, whichever one doesn’t matter. I’m not talking about javascript engines or any browser specific features, only the actual rendoring engine, the part that draws to the browser window, so that we as developers can be assured that at least our sites will look the same on whatever browser the clients choose to use based on there feature sets and preferences. If they were to choose an engine, i would have to say that the opera or Konquorer engines makes a lot of sense, they are fast, probably the most standards compliant (yes i know there will be other suggestions) and in opera’s case work in the mobile world as well

I for one am sick and tired of a fight for standards where we as the ones having to implement the sites, simply do not get heard, again opera is an exception IMHO.

Many of the problems with layout in the current version of CSS could be solved relatively easily by something as simple as having an absolute positioning mode that DIDN’T take the DIV out of the flow. That way the enclosing element would then expand to hold its contents, and any other elements that might be beneath it (like footers) could be pushed down.

Add, say, a “parent” option to height, so that a DIV could automatically expand to be the height of its parent element, and you’ve fixed 95% of the problems with footers and equal-length columns.

I’d much rather see them recommend a few enhancements along those lines rather than attempt to design a super-complex one-size-fits-all system that’s impossible to implement.