Ask an expert: Why is CSS...the way it is?

An interesting perspective from a technical director at the W3C on how and why CSS came to be what it is today. What struck me were the similarities between building platform features for the web and building just about any other piece of software. Read these excerpts and try to tell me they don’t sound exactly like any other piece of software you’ve ever worked on:

Once a feature is in place, it’s easier to slightly improve it than to add a new, better, but completely different feature that does the same thing.

This also explains why the first two improvements to specifying color in CSS—a named-color system and a hue-wheel, polar notation—were adopted over much better, but more complicated, systems proposed at the same time. They were slight improvements, seen as easy to implement.

The idea lost momentum, and we chose the path of least resistance instead.

After a week of mailing list discussion and no suggestions for improvement, the consensus was that my syntax was good enough for now.