Someone should write an article on why technologists are so excited/desperate for the future in which they believe all the right things must surely happen because all the right reasons are in place.
I read the title and I thought "this is going to say 'because it's better'. When does that correlate with massive technology standard popularity?".
What's next for CSS? Probably CSS Current_Version+1, designed by committee, late, missing really desirable and important features and including really lame and awkward features, not exhaustively specified and not implemented completely by anything other than Opera, and not done in the same way on all browsers.
"Someone should write an article on why technologists are so excited/desperate for the future"
Nobody ever writes about a utopian future filled with backwards compatibility and design by committee. Is the future more rosy because it works as an imagined place without the thorns and caterpillars and fungi and drought and hay fever and pollen allergies and cheap imported roses and Monsanto seeds?
"What's next for CSS? Probably CSS Current_Version+1, designed by committee [...]"
But this is the beautiful thing about popularizing the concept of compiling to CSS. Once you are liberated from the Browser's implementation a whole new world opens up. Experimentation can be conducted in languages that compile to CSS.
Right now the reason why we need a committee to decide what goes into CSS is that we all suffer the consequences if they get it wrong. With languages that compile to CSS, bad ideas only hurt that language.
Freedom for experimentation can only be good for CSS in the long run.
I believe jlong is referring to the functionality added by an abstraction layer. Sass allows people to experiment with additions to CSS, and it gives the CSS designers good insight into what people would find most useful.
Css has been thwarted by poor implementation that has led to confusion, and elitism. With regards to abstraction I don't see why there aren't any excellent WYSIWYG editors.
