Bert Bos: What is a good standard? An essay on W3C’s design principles.

Why doesn’t HTML include tags for style? Why can’t you put text inside SMIL? Why doesn’t CSS include commands to transform a document? Why, in short, does W3C modularize its specification and why in this particular way? This essay tries to make explicit what the developers in the various W3C working groups mean when they invoke words like efficiency, maintainability, accessibility, extensibility, learnability, simplicity, longevity, and other long words ending in -y.

The single-page printable version is one place where you might want to use Mozilla’s DOM Inspector to adjust CSS on the fly: you can edit any h2‘s CSS style rules to bring the section headers down to something reasonable, and maybe add a border or something else to visually mark the headers.

You could, of course, just save as “Web Page, complete” and edit the CSS files manually. I think the DOM inspector is more fun and saves me the trouble of sifting through several files.

Anyway, this all misses the point: it’s an interesting essay.