Two and a half weeks ago we solicited questions for Håkon Wium Lie, the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Opera Software. Hakon, of course, is also known as the father of CSS and as the one who proposed the Acid2 test.

Here is a snippet of some of his answers to questions that were submitted by Opera Watch readers. This interview is part of this month’s issue of Opera Bits, which is due out later today.

Anonymous: I don’t know if he is the right one to ask, but I’d like to know if there will be more css3-selectors like :last-child order the :nth-selectors in the near future? The latest changelogs seem to me, that more GUI-features are implemented, but a significant improvement of the CSS3-support is lacking a bit.

Hakon: We have prioritized fixing old bugs over adding new functionality. The Acid2 test now renders flawlessly in Opera and having interoperable functionality of the CSS2.1 layout model is more important than most CSS3 modules. As the CSS3 drafts mature, you will see more support from us.

FataL: Håkon, what do you think about idea of CSS Naked Day (April 5th)?

Hakon: I liked the naked day idea. This is what I wrote in a comment on the blog:

This is a fun idea, fully in line with the reasons for creating CSS in the first place. While most designers are attracted by the extra presentational capabilities, saving HTML from becoming a presentational language was probably a more important motivation for most people who participated in the beginning.

Thomas Scholz: You used Prince to print your thesis — will Opera cooperate with Prince to improve the printing capabilities of the Opera browser? Are there any other concrete plans for CSS printing?

Hakon: Yes, I used Prince to make a PDF file of the thesis. Bert Bos and I also used Prince for our book on CSS. Ideally, Opera would be able to do the job. However, making a PDF file is quite different from displaying content on the screen. Opera is tuned for speed and size, while Prince is tuned for that page number references that cannot be resolved until the whole book has been formatted. So, from an engineering perspective it makes sense to have two different programs.

The W3C CSS WG is working on more advanced print features and I think we’ll see strong uptake of CSS for print-oriented content.

David Naylor: Apparently, someone has started thinking about creating an Acid3 test. What useful features are there to be tested in such a test, which aren’t already in the Acid2 test?

Hakon: Yes, I think it’s time to start thinking about Acid3. The basic principle should remain the same: Acid3 should be a one-page test to help browser vendors keep their promises. As for functionality, I think acid3 should be an applications, not a document.

Bernie Zimmermann: Håkon, why doesn’t CSS support constants? Being able to assign an RGB value to a constant, for instance, could make stylesheet maintenance a lot more manageable. Was it just an oversight?

Hakon: No, we thought about it. True, it would have saved some typing. However, there are also some downsides. First, the CSS syntax would have been more complex and more programming-like. Second, what would be the scope of the constant? The file? The document? Why? In the end we decided it wasn’t worth it.

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