Google and Opera split from WebKit to create Blink, their own HTML
rendering engine, and everyone was worried about the effect on
standards. Now we have the first big example of a split in the form of CSS Regions
support. Essentially Regions are used to provide the web equivalent of
text flow, a concept very familiar to anyone who has used a desktop
publishing program. The basic idea is that you define containers for a
text stream which is then flowed from one container to another to
provide a complex multicolumn layout. The W3C standard for Regions has
mostly been created by Adobe — a long time DTP company. Now the Blink
team has proposed removing Regions support to save 10,000 lines of code
in 350,000 in the name of efficiency. If Google does remove the Regions
code, which looks highly likely, this would leave Safari and IE 10/11
as the only two major browsers to support Regions. Both Apple and
Microsoft have an interest in ensuring that their hardware can be used
to create high quality magazine style layouts — Google and Opera aren't
so concerned. I thought standards were there to implement not argue
with
