This is a discussion topic which came to mind after reading comments in this thread
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Feel free to comment or share your thoughts on the topic.
Note that these comments relate to the naming and semantic meanings of css tags, and not the syntax and parsing of css (as both w3c css and javaFX css seem to be equivalent in the later regard).
You know, sometimes I find JavaFX's lack of certain css features refreshing. It is nice to have all, well, almost all, of the JavaFX CSS documented on one page. I think if you were to do the same thing for w3c css then it would end up with a much larger, more difficult to understand document and even what the contents of that document should be would probably be pretty controversial, in the same kind of way that the HTML5 specification ended up being. Microsoft contributed over 7000 tests to w3c just to cover only a subset of the css rules available in browsers today. The webkit project lists almost a thousand open CSS bugs: https://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?product=WebKit&component=CSS&resolution=---. So implementing even partial w3c CSS support is a complex project.
When I first started using JavaFX CSS I found the differences to w3c CSS quite jarring, and it was hard to account for them. Now that I am used to JavaFX CSS, I don't have as much of an issue. The difference in names and semantics is going to be an impediment to designers working on JavaFX who are familar with w3c CSS - but the designers will quickly also discover that FXML is not HTML and Java is not JavaScript and JavaFX deployment is not HTML deployment. So, perhaps, in the larger picture, it is not as big a deal as it would seem. Still, one can't help think that any impediment to people easily picking up and adopting JavaFX is doing the technology a disservice.
There are other advantages in having the JavaFX CSS in it's own namespace to w3c css, in that it can evolve seperately, it is not expected to be exactly the same because it has a different name, it is not expected to fully implement w3c css as browsers do because it's clearly a different thing by name, etc. There is even precedent for it in the use by mozilla of moz- CSS prefixes and webkit css properties http://css-infos.net/properties/webkit - the web as not as standard as a lot of people propose. JavaFX CSS is backing a JavaFX rendering engine and not an HTML rendering engine. It is quite remarkable that Oracle was able to build and make available a CSS model for JavaFX that feels as familar as it does to w3c css, as w3c css is targeted very strongly toward styling a completely different technology set (HTML markup and document object model).
It would be useful to have a tool which translates w3c css to approximations of JavaFX css and vice versa, or the ability for JavaFX to have a mode (perhaps a boolean value when a stylesheet is loaded) to perform an automatic alias or mapping of w3c css to javafx (at least for the subset of w3c css which would make sense to automatically translate to JavaFX css). I haven't checked the JavaFX jira in detail, so perhaps a request for such support already exists - perhaps it is under the private http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-9272 jira.
The JavaFX css model is really powerful and I have found really useful some of the additions that it adds above the baseline 2.1 css that is found consistently in browsers. With the upcoming Java CSS object model http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-17293, you will also get better programmatic access from Java.
So, nice work on building and implementing this complex feature . . .