>>I'm very interested in technologies like GSS that ultimately don't try to change the behavior of the browser - just the behavior of the developers To me, it'

>>I'm very interested in technologies like GSS that ultimately don't try to change the behavior of the browser - just the behavior of the developers To me, it's not fully clear exactly what parts of the process GSS is trying to change and what the full consequences of it would be. Even if I knew what it was _trying_ to change, I wouldn't necessarily make the assumption that the intended change would be the only change, or even the most salient change, that we as practitioners would actually have to live with. I have to look at something like this from every possible angle before I would trust any such claim, because, well... that's just what I do. >>I personally would love for styling to get 5x faster. There's be no reason for me to charge any less for the work, so that'd basically be 5x more dollars for the styling portion of any given project That would be great as long as it lasted, I'm sure. But, I expect that sooner or later, the secret will get out that websites just got faster and easier to develop, and your clients will start to expect to either pay less or get more for the same money. Even if your company doesn't charge by the hour, there's little doubt that some of your competitors are hourly. However it played out, economics is going to prevail, eventually. I've been feeling some pain from CSS lately, which is definitely at least partly because there are newer tools and techniques available now that I still need to catch up on. My company has a guy who basically does nothing but handle the look of sites, and he ends up putting in some amount of time on practically every project we do. I have always thought of myself as a backend developer first and foremost, but CSS is hard to completely avoid. >>and CSS is quite good at the non-layout side of styling I don't know that I've heard it split into layout and non-layout before, but I'm assuming that non-layout is things like attaching colors and fonts to text, etc. CSS isn't bad for non-layout things, but, as far as I can tell, that is all of the easy stuff where there was no real engineering-type problem CSS had to solve, so, to screw that up, CSS would have needed to really work very, very hard at doing some inexplicably weird thing in order to have gotten that part wrong.