CSS is very prone to overspecification, and though I do write CSS, I find the notion of a “class” that has a background color of black, 5 pixel margins, and blue links being distinct from a class that has a background color of black, 6 pixel margins, and blue links completely at odds with the object oriented paradigm. Yes, we can make it one class and override on each individual ID, but that’s klutzy. Surely there must be a better way.

One thing I’d love to be able to do is define my own elements, inheriting from a base element and automatically applying CSS (and adding HTML) to create customized functionality. For example, I have a list of checkboxes on HireGeeks. I should simply be able to define the tag “checklist” or something and have the browser interpret that as “a list with checkboxes and this default styling”. How would one go about introducing such a standard anyway? It’s an idea that should be adopted, but short of making my own browser, I don’t see any way of introducing it to the community. It’s not as if W3C would listen (I wonder how Tim Berners-Lee would have done in such a regulated environment; probably not too well). Maybe XSLT? Or parse it on the server side?

Or does a standard exist for this already? I thought that was what XForms was supposed to be, but looking at the W3C’s page on it, I’m greeted with:

“The Forms working group is chartered by the W3C to develop the next generation of forms technology for the world wide web. The mission is to address the patterns of intricacy, dynamism, multi-modality, and device independence that have become prevalent in Web Forms Applications around the world. The technical reports of this working group have the root name XForms due to the use of XML to express the vocabulary of the forms technology developed by the working group.”

Well, uh… thanks, I guess. Wow, I can’t wait to “address the patterns of intricacy, dynamism, multi-modality and device independence!” in my web pages! So how do I use it? Is it supported by common browsers? What exactly does it do? Of course, that information is absent. Why does everyone do this? Is this the logical outcome of a society that values form so completely over function? One that mistakes sesquipedalianism (my favorite word in the English language, meaning “the attitude of using long words”) for insight?

Coupled with the mess that W3C has made of XHTML, their position as a gatekeeper of web standards, their abuse of this position by neglecting individual contributors (unless you run a business, you’re invisible to them, however good or even popular your ideas may be), and their general failure to solve common problems plaguing web developers today, I think the time has long passed where the W3C should have been dismantled, to be replaced by a community-based model (or even a grassroots one, as the web began in). Since the majority of web developers are either self-employed or belong to small firms, W3C is causing nothing less than the stagnation of web development with this attitude. Even worse, the companies that have the most influence on the panel (read: Microsoft) have a history of screwing things up (read: IE 6).