Unfortunately, his rant is foolish. He complains that this is a mess from the standards bodies, and yet they have done their job!

Why does he blame the standards body for implementing a well-defined standard? The W3C has *reams* of information on how CSS is supposed to work, under almost any conceivable circumstance. They spend years discussing and designing this stuff and, while it may not be perfect, the bigger failings are rarely theirs.

Why does he complain that stylesheets are hard to read and then *not blame the people that write them*? CSS is a technical markup language, and like any programming language, it is open to both good and bad practise. Do we blame the Oxford English Dictionary when people can't take the time to spell a word correctly?

He mentions the problems of browser bugs, but he doesn't actually place the responsibility for these at the manufacturer's feet. Seriously: if you double-clicked on a .txt file and got a bunch of rubbish on your screen, would you blame the people who invented ASCI, or the people who wrote your text editor?

I've done my share of web development, and I share your frustrations, but if anything's going to be done about the problem then we need to at least recognise where the problems are.

We could create a new standard, for browser manufacturers to again mangle in their own way. Or, perhaps, we should encourage them to correctly implement the standard that we have.

*MY* rant over! ;)

Frankly, I'm tired of people bashing things that are new and revolutionary and referring to them as failures when they have not had time to mature.

Just because _some_ people are having issues getting it to work is no reason to throw out the whole idea. It's a sound premise. Agreed, the browser providers need to all get on the same page, and I believe that as more developers move to web standards they will, but to simply discount it because it's "too hard" or doesn't work 100% in it's infancy is silly.

And that fact that it comes from someone who is considered a "thought leader" in this field makes me wonder if that label is worthy of them and call into quesion their opinions in general. They should see the potential of this and be more interested in finding ways to overcome it's short term growing pains.

I agree with what you are saying, but even (especially?)if CSS is a steping stone to something better, shouldn't we see where it's leading us?

The architectual concepts behind it are sound and "correct" IMHO, so if it's a way-point on a journey, I think we need to see it through to that end.

BTW, just to clairify, my "thought leader" comment was directed at Dvorak, not you.

I used to read his stuff religiously "back in the day" but over the past few years I've found some of his opinions and judgements... questionable.

If we don't use stylesheets what are we going to use?