sonunigam (Love Geek): Currently there is strong competition between Mozilla's Gecko layout engine used in Firefox, the WebKit layout engine used in Apple Safari and Google Chrome, the similar KHTML engine used in KDE's Konqueror browser, and Opera's Presto layout engine-- each of them is leading in different aspects of CSS. As of August 2009, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 2 and 3 have reasonably complete levels of implementation of CSS 2.1. *04-01-11 - 01:39:49
sonunigam (Love Geek): Limitations
Some noted disadvantages of using "pure" CSS include:
Poor layout controls for flexible layouts
While new additions to CSS3 provide a stronger, more robust layout feature-set, CSS is still very much rooted as a styling language, not a layout language. This problem has also meant that creating fluid layouts is still very much done by hand-coding CSS, and make the development of a standards-based WYSIWYG editor more difficult than expected. *
04-01-11 - 01:42:48
sonunigam (Love Geek): Selectors are unable to ascend
CSS offers no way to select a parent 0r ancestor of an element that satisfies certain criteria. A more advanced selector scheme (such as XPath) would enable more sophisticated style sheets. However, the major reasons for the CSS Working Group rejecting proposals for parent selectors are related to browser performance and incremental rendering issues. *
04-01-11 - 01:43:52
sonunigam (Love Geek): Vertical control limitations
While horizontal placement of elements is generally easy to control, vertical placement is frequently unintuitive, convoluted, 0r impossible. Simple tasks, such as centering an element vertically 0r getting a footer to be placed no higher than bottom of viewport, either require complicated and unintuitive style rules, 0r simple but widely unsupported rules. *
04-01-11 - 01:44:47
sonunigam (Love Geek): Absence of expressions
There is currently no ability to specify property values as simple expressions. This would be useful in a variety of cases, such as calculating the size of columns subject to a constraint on the sum of all columns. However, a working draft with a calc() value to address this limitation has been published by the CSS WG. *
04-01-11 - 01:46:32