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CSS is a semi-failure. It's alright for defining the look of items, but positioning of elements (the rough layout) is very fiddly. Just take a look at all those 3 column tutorials written by CSS experts. All of those come with different strings attached and all of them look like a hack... well, to tell the truth they are hacks. Things like that should be straightforward. Ironically that stuff is really easy with any real programming language. Why is it so damn fiddly with something as specialized as CSS?

For a typical 3 column layout with a fluid middle column, backgrounds which go all the way down to the bottom, and some margins you need quite a bit of math. Want to change the width of one of the sidebars? Uh uh... I hope you wrote lots of comments. If you did, you can just redo all the math yourself all over again.

CSS variables try to address at least this issue. It's tiresome and error prone. Letting a machine do a machine's job is only logical.

Most of the problems with CSS are related to the lowest common denominator which is IE and it's poor support for CSS.

The author makes some strange leaps of logic and I'm not entirely sure that they're not just flailing for reasons to decry this proposal from an emotional standpoint.