CSS is appealing to me because it's unlike almost any other programming language. Its syntax is odd. Its interpreters often disagree, and fudge their results in arcane but predictable ways. It's a language that is still riled up, when so many of its contemporaries have long since settled down.
There is something alluring in such a powerful and awkward tool. CSS feels like a language that man made: full of expressiveness, innovation, and crippling inconsistency. Contrast it against more classically beautiful programming languages — clean, elegant, and brutally fair ones, like Ruby and Python — and CSS looks warty and immature.
And it is. CSS as we know it is as young as the web, and reflects our growth as designers and technologists over the last decade. Its vagueness has made it adaptable, though often at the expense of developers forced to wrestle with its changing ruleset.
But this project is not really about grappling. Things look one way to me. They'll look another way to you, almost no matter what. We have some common ground, but also a totally unbridgeable gap between our viewing experiences. That's what makes the web feel like it belongs to all of us, though. We get used to how it looks on our computers, and it's always a little different everywhere else.
I think that's a valuable relationship.