You are right, there should be some development in making CSS easier to work with.

CSS is the primary means by which programmers style websites. Because of the sheer diversity of ways in which people might want to style elements, the diversity of CSS features is arguably necessary.

I like how CSS manages complexity: dividing properties (roughly) into two classes. On the one hand, you have “Common CSS” (a term I’m making up). This is the manageably small set of features which everybody uses every day, such as margin and font-size. Nowadays, you could also include border-radius and box-shadow due to their prevalence in modern aesthetic styles. On the other hand, you also have “Advanced CSS”, a huge set of specialized features which are rarely used but are nevertheless extremely valuable whenever you need to do whatever it is they handle (a good example is the linear() easing function you mentioned). You do not need to know Advanced CSS by heart in order to write good CSS; it is sufficient to know Common CSS and be able to search the MDN docs for Advanced CSS features.

We’ve had to move to “evergreen” browsers for HTML updates. Might as well take advantage of that to simplify CSS.

Even if it’ll be years until we can actually clean up the spec with a CSS 3000, and we can only mark features as “legacy” support, being able to define a reasonable, modern, usable subset would be a great step forward.

If someone feels CSS has too much features it means it’s not for them.

Maybe jobs will divide again into more specialized.

There should be way better visual editors to develop screen (reader) elements, their definition, layout, transitions etc., and produce the actual CSS that will go into production. Get rid of the separation between design and develop, we’re all in the same team.

An I really got the feeling, that the W3C, WHATWEG and browser vendors are much more focused on designing and implementing features that people actually need in order to do their daily job. Using floats for a multi-column-layout was fine back then, but using flexbox and grid just feels so much nicer than having to understand what a clearfix is.

Nowadays, we need way less strange hacks to accomplish what we need, which should make code easier to read. But now, that we got so many great features at hand, the fine-grained control over every aspect of a design often results in things 100 lines of CSS for a button and many levels of abstraction with custom properties.

On top of that, there are many properties of questionable use like will-change, contain or contain-intrinsic-size. Of course, these are a welcome addition for complex apps, but many devs are feeling the pressure of using these in rather simple projects as well, adding unnecessary complexity with little gains.

For me, there’s too much CSS to learn all of it in detail now, but on the other hand: maybe it is also not needed any longer to learn all of it.

Natural languages are not declarative languages. CSS risks becoming C++, you can do 1 thing in 10 ways which is bad and in an ecosystem of frameworks and libraries further splits the community. On natural languages, the world too is split up by language too many ways to say bread.l

So while I might not use certain features now, others might well find interesting uses for them in future. And probably create all kinds of stuff I’d never have imagined as a result.

Do we stop adding new words that are relevant today, or throw out the 830,000 words that are not currently in use?

I would suggest this is similar to your query about there being too much CSS.

So long as those 100 made making websites look and behave how I want them to a lot easier. It should be about practicality not excitement.

If I ran a browser I would certainly be focusing on devex. The more web apps there are as opposed to native ones, the more power and intel the browsers can gather. (I guess we’re in trouble if they start injecting ads…)

The people that care about a11y are proactive in adding features that make a11y easier to implement.

The people that request the web to freeze in place for the sake of a11y are just stagnating.