Eric Meyer was also a prominent invited expert for seven years in the CSS Working Group, the folks in charge of maintaining and developing CSS. Needless to say, he’s a person you’d want to ask about the CSS3. Today I ask Eric Meyer six questions on the topic of CSS3, and here’s what he has to say. What do you think are the most exciting developments and extensions of CSS in CSS3? [Eric Meyer]: This will confirm once and for all that I’m basically a big huge code nerd, but honestly, the advanced selectors. Sure, sure, opacity and rounded corners and multiple background images and pretty things blah blah blah. All very nice. But the power to describe Web 2.0 designs in CSS is insignificant compared with the power to select every third table row starting with the fifth one. Or being able to select the first paragraph within another element, even if it’s not the first child. Or selecting any list item that’s the last item in the list. Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. Well, and Web Fonts are kind of cool too. I’ll grant you that. Let’s discuss the modularization of CSS specifications. The CSS specification for CSS3 is modularized (presumably after lessons learned in CSS2)

how has this affected the timeline, progression, and mainstream adoption of CSS3 specs? [Eric Meyer]: It really means there is no such thing as "CSS3" the way there was a CSS2. There’s no great big monolithic specification called CSS3. There’s just a bunch of parallel efforts, some of which move more quickly than others. I don’t honestly know what it’s done to adoption. We had a great big long pause in CSS advancement in the first half of this decade– I call it "the IEnterregnum"– and it’s only been recently that we’ve seen browsers pushing past the edges of CSS2 in any major way. On the other hand, you could argue that the pause was good because it let vendors focus on fixing bugs and reaching consistency instead of running off in ten different directions. Nor would I oppose that argument. My real point is that because of how things have gone, it’s hard to measure CSS3 adoption against what came before. I do think the split caused an overall slowdown in the development of the specifications. No way to prove that, of course, but that’s the feeling I get. It’s a big part of why I left the WG, and why I’ve been only peripherally involved in some of the other W3C’s efforts. Full Post Here