Confused over CSS 2.1

Deprecated items?

[Hester]

I've recently discovered the W3C's Working Draft for CSS 2.1: [w3.org ] I'm confused as it says some features of CSS 2.0 are no longer used. Does this mean they are deprecated? Or will that happen only when a Final Draft of the specs comes out?

For instance, the current draft states:

The 'font-stretch' and 'font-size-adjust' properties don't exist in CSS 2.1.

Font descriptors and the '@font-face' declaration don't exist in CSS 2.1.

This seems to fly in the face of progress. So we can no longer hope for a wider range of fonts to be applied via @font-face? And they've taken away font-size-adjust!

Then there's text-shadow, which is now implemented in Safari:

The 'text-shadow' property is not in CSS 2.1.

So why have the Safari team implemented a feature that's not part of the future of CSS?

There are some interesting additions to CSS 2.0 as well, but which should we, as web designers, support?

The specs describe CSS 2.1 thus:

CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's "style" attribute and a new calculation of the 'clip' property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a "snapshot" of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably at the date of publication of the Recommendation.

[Hester]

Ah wait, I see text-shadow and font-size-adjust are now part of CSS3.