CSS 2.1 finally a standard just in time for CSS 3

From the ‘Why Web Standards Seem Lame‘ files:

I got a release this afternoon stating that the CSS 2.1 standard had been finalized.

Yes, I did a double-take too.

CSS 2.1 people!

Here we are in 2011, the era of HTML5 and CSS 3 and the W3C is out with a release about CSS 2.1.

“People have asked us ‘Why is CSS 2.1 taking so long?'”, said Daniel
Glazman, CSS Working Group Co-chair in a statement. “CSS 2.1 is a really large
collection of formatting features, and we had to not only carefully
review and specify all the potential interactions between them, but also
learn from existing implementations and of course tests. Time ensured
quality and interoperability.”

Nonsense.

It took so long because standards follow practice and not the other way around. Every web browser has been supporting its own version of CSS 2.x for the last 5 or more years and now that vendor attention has shifted to HTML5 and CSS 3 the W3C is tabulating the final scorecard for CSS 2.1.