Mike Pick recently created a wish list of print design features missing from CSS, a discussion that continued at Dave Shea's mezzoblue. Would that CSS provided element awareness -- height: inherit(#otherElement), Shea points out, would accomplish effective proportion control -- a method to create linked text boxes, and a way to properly set vertical alignment. Dave Shea asks:
Why aren't a few designers involved in building a language meant for style?
We don't know, either.
Update: As it turns out, David Baron was thinking about multi-column text with CSS as early as June 1998, though the idea would not have been new even then to the W3C, which decided in 1997 to merely add the concept as a note to CSS-1. Just next week it will have been 6 years since that note. Talk about familiar memes.