So what you are suggesting here is not: "Do away with CSS" but rather, "Add some stuff to CSS"

This isn't new. Computer Science is called computer science because it can change. Algorithms can be shown to be less efficient than another algorithm. Ideas can be shown to be incomplete, meaning, they can't solve 100% of problems.

This is true in other areas as well. We still teach and use Newton's Laws to describe many concepts in kinematics, even though they don't do a perfect job.

My point is that the solution isn't to scrap CSS, but to add things like you suggest, which would be awesome. The problem however is that the browsers aren't going to support those new formulas, so what do you do for all the browsers out there that don't support your math, but you still want the site to be accessible?

Here comes in the problem with competition -- some vendors can't keep up, some customers can't keep up. IE is way way behind. Microsoft should just scrap the browser effort and focus on the operating system. FireFox is great, but it's buggy. Opera behaves strangely and the developer tools aren't as good.

The point is that each of these browsers doing things differently is part of the problem. They are vendors of the tool we use to display our pages. We are the ones inconvenienced by their lackadaisacal attitude toward standards compliance -- and they are slacking too.

The Standards bodies are slacking because there is no standard video format. There is no video tag. Oh wait, there is a video tag:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/html5_video.asp

But who supports it? Opera does. Not much else as of a year ago: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/03/html-5-suppor-1.ht...

Oh wait, no one uses Opera.

You want to know the solution? Eliminate competition in the browser market. Oh your capitalist ears are burning aren't they? Why do we need IE, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and on and on? We don't. They are slowing us down.

Standardize the browser. Make it open source. Make it work on all devices. Make it follow the standards. Make it follow the standards by a specific date. Release a new version and auto update everyone so we are always all using the latest standards compliant browser.

You argue it's against the american way. It's socialist. It's big government.

No it isn't. It's not America, it's The Internet. The companies should comply willingly. Take all the best browser people from Microsoft, Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and Google and make a new body funded by domain name registrations and credit card transactions on the web.

Yes a tax. A tax. It is a tiny one penny tax and it will more than pay for itself in the time saved to develop new information systems that will model the vision of the web.

I argue that the web is a public good. It is an international public good. It's a public good as much as roads, electricity, train tracks, bridges, and automobiles.

In the brick and mortar world that surrounds us, vehicles transport people, wires transport electrons. Those electrons today carry more information than a person, yet we continue to build infrastructure to transport physical bodies and neglect the information.

If we want to progress as a human civilication with powers beyond current imagination, the first thing we need to be able to do is collaborate effectively. To do that we need better, more accessible information systems, and to do that we need a stronger more capable infrastructure. The connection between that infrastructure and the human who will participate is the browser and that should not be controlled by a company with justifiably selfish motives.

We want corporations to compete and fight, but we want the world to collaborate. Corporations aren't always the best organizations to trust to enable collaboration. Sometimes collaboration isn't best insured by corporations.

So the question then is, are we going to let the corporations continue to slow us down? Are we going to form a one world browser? Are we going to pay for it with taxes? Are we going to pay for it with volunteer labor?

How is it going to get done? How are we going to continue to move forward supporting the laggards who don't want to upgrade from IE5 or IE6 or just do away with IE all together?

At some point you have to make a choice to embrace technology and move forward, or be left behind.