As you might have noticed, I recently wrote about how I got started with CSS a quarter century ago, what I’ve seen change over that long span of t

Posts from June 2021

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2021-07-11 15:30:07

As you might have noticed, I recently wrote about how I got started with CSS a quarter century ago, what I’ve seen change over that long span of time, and the role testing has played in both of those things.

After all, CSS tests are most of how I got onto the Cascading Style Sheets & Formatting Properties Working Group (as it was known then) back in the late 1990s. After I’d finished creating tests for nearly all of CSS, I wrote the chair of the CSS&FP WG, Chris Lilley, about it. The conversation went something like, “Hey, I have all these tests I’ve created, would the WG or browser makers be at all interested in using them?” To which the answer was a resounding yes.

Not too much later, I made some pithy-snarky comment on www-style about how only the Cool Kids on the WG knew what was going on with something or other, and I wasn’t one of them, pout pout. At which point Chris emailed me to say something like, “We have this role called Invited Expert; how would you like to be one?” To which the answer was a resounding (if slightly stunned) yes.

I came aboard with a lot of things in mind, but the main thing was to merge my test suite with some other tests and input from smart folks to create the very first official W3C test suite. Of any kind, not just for CSS. It was announced alongside the promotion of CSS2 to Recommendation status in December 1998.