6 ms·

I shall never begin to grasp why Grid was not a top priority and feature in CSS 1.0. Two+ decades spent on kludges to have things line up in columns.

JimDabell 9y ago
Because when CSS 1.0 was being designed, the primary use case was documents, not application interfaces. The processing model revolved around streams of content flowing downwards, with the occasional exception. That's why laying things out vertically with CSS is often more challenging than laying things out horizontally. The assumption was that content starts at the top and flows downwards on an infinite canvas until it is finished, with the length of the document defined by the content. Contrast that with the width, where it has a finite size defined by the viewport and is wrapped. This processing model makes perfect sense for documents, less so for application interfaces.
- interfixus 9y ago
  Yes, I know that rationale. But please! CSS was a web technology from the start. I routinely committed the deadly sin of table layouts from the mid nineties all the way up into the new millenium, because that was the only way to do it. It is utterly beyond me how CSS - glib explanations or not - could blithely ignore this very real need all through 1.0, 2.0, and well into 3.0. But I must say, Grid was almost worth the twenty years wait, and it does bring on a sweet nostalgic rush once again having to shake a fist at various MS browsers.
  - JimDabell 9y ago
    > CSS was a web technology from the start. Sure, of course it was. But the web was almost entirely a collection of documents back then.
    - interfixus 9y ago
      Not how I remember it at all. By some felicitous fluke I still have the very first html I ever coded, anno 1995, complete with background sound and animated gif - but cut me a bit of slack: It was purely a personal excercise. The thing was done purely from what I'd learned studying source of available websites. The point being: My God, it's full of tables. They were a real thing by that time.
      - dustingetz 9y ago
        PDF documents have tables. Documents are things meant for a human, it's not raw data, for computers to understand it you need machine learning. Applications are not based off documents but rather the raw data (which the machine natively understands). The transition of web from documents to a dumb platform for application software delivery is why the web is no longer the web. It is just application delivery infrastructure now. Each application lives in a walled garden and is no longer a "web" at all.
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      Sure was. It looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/19961022174810/http://www.altavista.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961022174810/http://www.altavi...
ilovecomputers 9y ago
Here's the history of CSS layouts as told by a CSSWG spec writer: http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/weblog/2012/css-layout-evolution/ http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/weblog/2012/css-layout-evolut...
- interfixus 9y ago
  Neat writeup, thank you.
gsnedders 9y ago
The goal of CSS 1.0 was to just move formatting out of HTML; it added relatively little beyond what was already doable with HTML (and a lot of what was new were things needed to typeset howcome's PhD thesis nicely).
GuiA 9y ago
You are being downvoted, but are asking the right questions. I learned the fundamentals of graphic design through print design, as that is a medium that designers have worked with for much longer than the computer screen. A lot of designers approach print design by starting with a grid that describes how their content will be laid out, and proceed from there. Of course, you can find exceptions to this (although in many cases they will be an example of a designer breaking the rules because they know them so well), but most design students will be familiar with that approach. "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" (1981) is one of the reference texts on this subject, if you're interested in getting deeper. The other commenters say, in reply to your question, that it was just for formatting HTML, and for web documents rather than applications. That is just completely missing the point - print documents are documents too, not applications. The main argument that the web is so different from print because the canvas is infinite doesn't make much sense either - even if the canvas is conceptually infinite, it still renders on a finite surface (your screen), and one can design modular grid systems that easily accommodate that (as well as the other related concerns, like the user not having the right font installed, or different pixel densities/aspect ratios, etc.). In the end, the best explanation seems to be that the CSS spec was never led by actual designers who could envision the sort of problems that one would face when designing documents for the web. The CSS spec committee is full of very hard working, smart people, but they have the concerns of engineers first - browser compatibility, rendering complexity, etc. - rather than designers. The fact that the "holy grail of web design"[0] is a thing is absolutely mind blowing to me. This is the kind of design any first semester design student would execute, and any styling language that does not let you implement it in 10 lines is a styling language resolutely not designed by (or for) designers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design)
- xxxdarrenxxx 9y ago
  when the actual screen pixels are rendered by a gpu on a grid, but what's on top is not we call this logical /sarcasm A grid is also used for engineering schematics. Structures with a grid as common denominator also map nicely to for example 3D. Not to mention, having a grid based system also means one can transform and make assumptions, with quite literally mathematical precision. These things conceptually have been solved 2000 years ago, as you can see in engineering feats of ancient greece/rome. People always say don't reinvent the wheel, so why isn't basic geometry (grid) defacto since the beginning, at least as an option. In fact I will dare to go further. I think not using basic geometric concepts from the beginning, gave us a 15 years hangover off issues. Math works, working around math is ignorant. I think it's a mess, meanwhile these are actual issues: -Portrait vs Landscape (or square) and how fonts fit in, and how you can present enough information without having a billboard for a webpage. Our eyes are the real bottleneck. - mouse vs touch This is also relevant, a totally change in interfacing with a screen, but one that has natural arguments for it.

JimDabell 9y ago

Because when CSS 1.0 was being designed, the primary use case was documents, not application interfaces. The processing model revolved around streams of content flowing downwards, with the occasional exception. That's why laying things out vertically with CSS is often more challenging than laying things out horizontally. The assumption was that content starts at the top and flows downwards on an infinite canvas until it is finished, with the length of the document defined by the content. Contrast that with the width, where it has a finite size defined by the viewport and is wrapped. This processing model makes perfect sense for documents, less so for application interfaces.

interfixus 9y ago
Yes, I know that rationale. But please! CSS was a web technology from the start. I routinely committed the deadly sin of table layouts from the mid nineties all the way up into the new millenium, because that was the only way to do it. It is utterly beyond me how CSS - glib explanations or not - could blithely ignore this very real need all through 1.0, 2.0, and well into 3.0. But I must say, Grid was almost worth the twenty years wait, and it does bring on a sweet nostalgic rush once again having to shake a fist at various MS browsers.
- JimDabell 9y ago
  > CSS was a web technology from the start. Sure, of course it was. But the web was almost entirely a collection of documents back then.
  - interfixus 9y ago
    Not how I remember it at all. By some felicitous fluke I still have the very first html I ever coded, anno 1995, complete with background sound and animated gif - but cut me a bit of slack: It was purely a personal excercise. The thing was done purely from what I'd learned studying source of available websites. The point being: My God, it's full of tables. They were a real thing by that time.
    - dustingetz 9y ago
      PDF documents have tables. Documents are things meant for a human, it's not raw data, for computers to understand it you need machine learning. Applications are not based off documents but rather the raw data (which the machine natively understands). The transition of web from documents to a dumb platform for application software delivery is why the web is no longer the web. It is just application delivery infrastructure now. Each application lives in a walled garden and is no longer a "web" at all.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Sure was. It looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/19961022174810/http://www.altavista.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961022174810/http://www.altavi...

ilovecomputers 9y ago

Here's the history of CSS layouts as told by a CSSWG spec writer: http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/weblog/2012/css-layout-evolution/ http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/weblog/2012/css-layout-evolut...

interfixus 9y ago
Neat writeup, thank you.

gsnedders 9y ago

The goal of CSS 1.0 was to just move formatting out of HTML; it added relatively little beyond what was already doable with HTML (and a lot of what was new were things needed to typeset howcome's PhD thesis nicely).

GuiA 9y ago

You are being downvoted, but are asking the right questions. I learned the fundamentals of graphic design through print design, as that is a medium that designers have worked with for much longer than the computer screen. A lot of designers approach print design by starting with a grid that describes how their content will be laid out, and proceed from there. Of course, you can find exceptions to this (although in many cases they will be an example of a designer breaking the rules because they know them so well), but most design students will be familiar with that approach. "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" (1981) is one of the reference texts on this subject, if you're interested in getting deeper. The other commenters say, in reply to your question, that it was just for formatting HTML, and for web documents rather than applications. That is just completely missing the point - print documents are documents too, not applications. The main argument that the web is so different from print because the canvas is infinite doesn't make much sense either - even if the canvas is conceptually infinite, it still renders on a finite surface (your screen), and one can design modular grid systems that easily accommodate that (as well as the other related concerns, like the user not having the right font installed, or different pixel densities/aspect ratios, etc.). In the end, the best explanation seems to be that the CSS spec was never led by actual designers who could envision the sort of problems that one would face when designing documents for the web. The CSS spec committee is full of very hard working, smart people, but they have the concerns of engineers first - browser compatibility, rendering complexity, etc. - rather than designers. The fact that the "holy grail of web design"[0] is a thing is absolutely mind blowing to me. This is the kind of design any first semester design student would execute, and any styling language that does not let you implement it in 10 lines is a styling language resolutely not designed by (or for) designers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design)

xxxdarrenxxx 9y ago
when the actual screen pixels are rendered by a gpu on a grid, but what's on top is not we call this logical /sarcasm A grid is also used for engineering schematics. Structures with a grid as common denominator also map nicely to for example 3D. Not to mention, having a grid based system also means one can transform and make assumptions, with quite literally mathematical precision. These things conceptually have been solved 2000 years ago, as you can see in engineering feats of ancient greece/rome. People always say don't reinvent the wheel, so why isn't basic geometry (grid) defacto since the beginning, at least as an option. In fact I will dare to go further. I think not using basic geometric concepts from the beginning, gave us a 15 years hangover off issues. Math works, working around math is ignorant. I think it's a mess, meanwhile these are actual issues: -Portrait vs Landscape (or square) and how fonts fit in, and how you can present enough information without having a billboard for a webpage. Our eyes are the real bottleneck. - mouse vs touch This is also relevant, a totally change in interfacing with a screen, but one that has natural arguments for it.