Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

The Problem of Writing Against a Moving Target
Late Saturday night I was up putting what I though was to be the finishing touches on a chapter in the new book dealing with CSS text properties.

After writing about browser compatibility for the various properties in that chapter (typically the last thing I do before closing it and sending it off) I thought I'd better go and check some small detail against the official W3C specification.

I'm glad I did, though at the time I certainly felt defeated.

Less than a couple of weeks ago the W3C put up a new "final call" draft (i.e. the penultimate draft) covering the section I had just finished writing about. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened, and typically there have been some minor changes to the spec, and maybe a property or two is re-named.

Not this time. The W3C ended up proposing almost 45 wholly new properties. Augh!

It turns out that they have decided to adopt a number of properties that Microsoft has already implemented in its browser (which unfortunately means a slight re-write to another chapter I had considered finished) but the ended up adding new properties wholesale, primarily involved with formatting non-Western style text.

Oh well, getting it right means the book will be more relevant when it hits the streets. I just hope there aren't other, similar surprises in store down the road.