Heya Jeff, this is Tab Atkins, member of the CSS Working Group.
I feel your pain, man. I’m a web developer too, and I’ve cursed at the same pain points you’ve found. That’s why I got myself involved in the CSSWG and eventually became a member - so I could fix them.
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Vertical alignment - Yeah, it’s all kinds of suck right now. There’s no way around it. You can use
s, or, if you are okay with hacking some alternate solution for IE6 and IE7, you can use display:table and avoid people crying. My primary goal at the moment in the CSSWG is working on the layout specs, cleaning them up and making them better for us devs, and Flexbox solves the vertical layout problem better than tables ever did. That’ll still be a few years until it’s supported widely enough to use though.
Variables - This is something we’ve been trying to push for years internally, actually. It’s somewhat painful to admit how slow progress has been on this when it’s so necessary. Regardless, CSS variables is definitely going through.
Nesting - I’ve got a Mixins spec on the back burner to go alongside Variables that will partially address this. The full nesting-fixes that LESS and SASS introduce, though, will probably never be a part of CSS. But hey, never say die, right?