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Tab Atkins

Heya, Tab Atkins here, member of the CSSWG. Allow me to address each of your requests, arbitrarily reordered to suit my whims:

* CROSS-BROWSER IMPLEMENTATION OF FONT-SIZE-ADJUST
* CALC
* INDENTATION AND HANGING PUNCTUATION PROPERTIES
* TEXT ALIGNMENT AND HYPHENATION PROPERTIES
* IMPLEMENTATION OF THE ::MARKER PSEUDO-ELEMENT

These are all pretty much a matter of time. All of these properties will move through the standards process and be implemented as browser vendors decide to pay attention. So you don’t have to take any particular action, except maybe to bug (with actual bugs, like in their bug tracker) browsers to implement the ones you care about most.

* MORE CONTROL OVER OVERFLOWING TEXT

This is an area where we could really use some use-cases so we can figure out exactly what controls are needed. If you could produce some pictures or samples or whatnot where you would really have liked some auto-generated ellipses, it would be great if you could send them to the www-style@w3.org mailing list.

(It’s also a spec that needs more editor attention – CSS3 is kinda big and we don’t actually have enough editors to work on all of it at once, unfortunately. But it’ll be done eventually.)

* SELECTOR GROUPING WITH -MOZ-ANY
* PARENT SELECTOR

Both of these should show up in Selectors 4, once someone has enough bandwidth to write the spec. I’m pushing for the latter to be a :has-child(selector) pseudoclass.

* MORE CONTROL OVER STYLING FORM ELEMENTS

Tantek is back at Mozilla and has picked up his former editorship of CSS3 UI again. Better control over styling form elements is explicitly one of his goals for CSS UI 4. Expect some stuff to start showing up in this area in the coming year.

* FLEXIBLE BOX LAYOUT

I and Alex Mogilevsky (from Microsoft) are working on a minor rewrite of this spec right now to take it slightly further away from its XUL roots and make it slightly more useful within the context of modern webpages. After that, expect to see more implementations showing up. Fun!

* NESTED SELECTORS
* VARIABLES

Here at Google we’ve got a group putting together a new experimental implementation of variables, along with mixins, namespaces, and selector nesting. That’s why Webkit’s previous variables implementation was removed last month – it was just some cleanup at the start of the project. A spec proposal for the CSSWG should be following soon.

* STANDARDISED COMMENTS

As you say, this isn’t really a CSS issue. We just need a tool to show that adding metadata in a standardized form to your CSS files is useful, and then for that tool to become ubiquitous. Something like Doxygen.