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The inventors of CSS: what they would do differently if designing CSS again
- open-source-ux 8y agoHere is a partial summary of what they said in the talk: Bert Bos: - Feels there was too little detail in the first CSS spec (but Håkon Wium Lie thinks there wasn't enough) - Wishes there were more ways to display link behaviour e.g. expanding/collapsing text - He wanted to create CSS syntax that was readable for people who were not programmers - He preferred a full stop (period) to mark the end of a group of statements. Curly brackets (braces) to group statements was Tim Berner-Lee's idea. - Grids should have been a fundamental part of the CSS spec from the beginning - Prefers the idea of CSS for documents and a separate language for UI elements - Thinks the cascade could have been made easier Håkon Wium Lie: - Feels there was too much detail in the first spec: the more you added to the spec, the harder it became to implement - Thinks that margin collapsing was too complicated for v1 and could have been dropped - Also thinks first-letter and first-sentence pseudo-elements should have been left out of v1 - Hypercard was based on the idea of cards rather than documents - he wished a CSS card element had been defined - He didn't want border radius originally, but designers insisted and he now likes it - The v1 spec was written without any test documents - he considers that a major mistake - They both approached CSS in a document frame of mind and wonders if they should have considered the idea of web apps more