Andy is among many feeling frustrated with slow progress of CSS3 specifications and role W3C plays or should play in their birth. Having no part in any standardization process with corresponding amount of experience in developing a specification, I’m certainly ill qualified for comment on it with any reasonable amount of certainty.

I am, for better or worse, a blogger and I was at WWW2007, so I do have an opinion that like any true blogger find irresistible not to share even if it is in all likelihood wrong. In short, I believe the current state is a result of fairly insignificant intersection between people feeling the pain and those able to do much about it.

At first we wanted to present information and nineties were largely spent developing tools to do so in efficient enough manner. Partial browser stagnation, Mozilla development and CSS2 together with HTML4/XHTML1 more or less brought it far enough that we started having bigger dreams, wanting to do new stuff with our data. Just displaying it on a page doesn’t feel enough anymore.

These days there is a lot of talk about semantic web, which doesn’t mean same to all people, but is mostly understood as adding meaning to published outputs in ways friendlier to later manipulation and hence more useful. Tools ranging from feeds and microformats to SPARQL might be different, but most are marching in same direction.

This doesn’t mean that current set of standards are perfect, but they are good enough that most of W3C doesn’t see them as a still open problem and has moved on to work on other more important things. You can probably listen to Tim Berners-Lee for hours these days without him muttering words HTML or CSS. They are also good enough for general public, which doesn’t care much about how something is done as long as it appears to work, to get what it wants.

There are approximately as many Pandas in world as developers with a sense of esthetics, so it is hardly surprising that people bothered enough with current state to complain are mainly designers who care about doing things right. Sadly they are not usually well represented in standards bodies and as mentioned there isn’t an outside pressure that could compensate.

The only hope I see for new push comes from browser makers who probably don’t want be relegated to a part of an easily replaceable platform for running Flash/Silverlight/Whathaveyou plugins. Hopefully money flowing to them from search engines is good enough to finance a greater effort than one done so far.