"Abject failure" is more than harsh. Not many people have the expertise to sit on these committees and the passion to drive through new changes. It takes a while.
In 2012, the www-style mailing list (where the CSS WG organised and discussed before moving to GitHub) was receiving up to 1400 messages a month: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/ . There was active participation from professional, full-time standards experts employed by Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft and more organisations. The author of this nesting spec first proposed it in 2011: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Jun/0022....
And this was hardly the first such discussion. You can find requests going back for years before even that point, with people requesting nesting/hierarchical rules and being shot down.
So no, there was no lack of expertise or passion. So why has it taken this long? A failure of leadership? A failure of process? Perhaps the few, pigheaded opponents of an obviously desired and useful feature were able to sabotage progress by making it impossible to achieve consensus. I don't know. But I refuse to let them off the hook because they finally got around to delivering something in 2021 that the web should have had in 2001.
> So no, there was no lack of expertise or passion.
Passion to make proposals != passion to drive through changes. Making the proposal is the first step. If you're in it for the long haul, you make revisions and get consensus.
Software engineers, largely speaking, love to design things, build them, and move on to the next project instead of dealing with maintenance. Standards committees, largely speaking, are designed to get consensus first and figure out what the issues are with a proposal before implementing it. This kind of "eat your vegetables" way of working drives off a lot of people. And of the remaining engineers who are patient enough to drive something through committee, most of them are off busy doing other things.
You might have a taste of what this is like if you have ever worked at a company that did design docs before implementation. Like, if you're proposing a change to the system, and you write up a short document and get a couple other engineers assigned to review it. Have you ever had more than a couple engineers assigned, like five or ten? All looking at it with critical eyes? Now imagine that they work at different companies.
> Perhaps the few, pigheaded opponents of an obviously desired and useful feature were able to sabotage progress by making it impossible to achieve consensus.
Jeezus, that's a great example of the kind of attitude that makes this so painful in the first place. I want to print this comment out on paper and mail it to the next person who complains about slow standards committees.
You're speculating about how people's personality flaws are sabotaging the process. Well, guess what? You're not the only one doing making shitty comments like that. People who make committees work get a lot of disrespect from random strangers on the internet.
Maybe someday you'll sit on a committee, but you shouldn't have to do that in order to have an ounce of empathy for how standards committees work.
Dude, this spec was ten years between ideation and a FPWD, for a feature with proven demand and prior art. Sympathy for committee members would be easier if they gave any sign of recognising that this constituted a failure to make timely progress and fulfil the working group's chartered purpose: advancing CSS to simplify web authoring.
But standards committees display the same depressing insularity and hostility to outside criticism as most institutions, preferring to censure its tone instead of reflecting on its truth. In reality, it wouldn't matter how diplomatically it was conveyed, it wouldn't trigger any kind of self-reflection, just the exact same special-pleading about their task's unique difficulty.
