Ah, Bert Bos, the W3C's "style activity lead". What a joke.
He's the guy who wasted a decade writing an ASCII-art based "template layout module"[1], which he was never able to persuade a single browser vendor to implement. It eventually got demoted from a working draft to a "note", which is the W3C's polite term for standards fanfiction.
His other major achievement is putting his own photo on every one of the CSS working group's web pages. I'm not joking: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/#endmatter .
And let me tell you tale of that photo/byline. It originally appeared on the working group's crappy 1990s site, which persisted until the late 2000s (because that's how fast things move at the W3C), and you could kinda forgive it as one of the dumb things people put on dumb 1990s websites.
Anyway, eventually it became too embarrassing that the working group responsible for CSS had such a shitty site, and some other members of the group took it upon themselves to produce a shiny new design with useful content, but sans Bos' photo. This done, they submitted what they'd come up to the W3C. Eventually, it showed up on the W3C's servers but, surprise, surprise, it had been rather mangled, and Bos' photo was back, clumsily shoved into a footer where it hadn't originally been.
It's a small, petty thing, but all the more hilarious for it. God knows how that guy still has a job at the W3C. Maybe he's best friends with Tim Berners-Lee, or something?
To be fair though, I should also say that nowadays the CSS working group has a lot of very smart people who absolutely understand the needs of web developers/designers, and have been tireless in getting things like Flexbox specced and implemented across different browsers.
CSS is about a decade behind where it should be, but that's not the fault of the people working on it now. And I think its future is actually comparatively bright, especially with the Houdini project taking off.
> He's the guy who wasted a decade writing an ASCII-art based "template layout module"[1], which he was never able to persuade a single browser vendor to implement. It eventually got demoted from a working draft to a "note", which is the W3C's polite term for standards fanfiction.
This is because it was absorbed into the larger and more fleshed-out Grid specification, which is nearly release-ready in multiple browsers. The ASCII art is actually really useful!
Didn’t Firefox have actual SASS support for some time? I think at least the dev tools had support for SASS source maps, but I’m not sure if the browser actually had support.
Meanwhile Smashing says something like 77% of audience uses SASS.