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Some of the names are unintuitive, sure. Though I don't think the ones you provided are in particular; I think your distaste for those is subjective. But it's r

by _bxg1 8y ago

Some of the names are unintuitive, sure. Though I don't think the ones you provided are in particular; I think your distaste for those is subjective. But it's really not hard to learn the names for concepts which themselves make sense (at the beginning, perhaps, but not for someone willing to put in a modicum of effort). Many of the worst parts of CSS, and even JavaScript for that matter, come from the need for backwards-compatibility. There are literally websites from the 90s that still render and function perfectly fine in a modern browser. That's an amazing property of the web, and I'd say it's worth the tradeoff of living with a few questionable decisions of the past. Plus, we continue to rapidly build new features on top of those backward-compatible ones, so it's not like we're truly held back by them. Modern CSS and JavaScript are barely recognizable from the 90s versions, but they still contain those as a subset.

mekoka 8y ago
> Some of the names are unintuitive, sure. Though I don't think the ones you provided are in particular; I think your distaste for those is subjective. Relative and absolute... Is there a CSS book or tutorial that doesn't take a jab at these names when explaining positioning?
- _bxg1 8y ago
  Relative means "relative to the default position", which makes perfect sense to me. Absolute means "I'm explicitly setting this position", which also makes fairly good sense. There are probably better names they could've used for "absolute", but there are also much worse ones. But the point is, these are just names. What really matters is the quality of the underlying system. You don't hear people complaining that Lisp uses made-up strings like "car" and "cdr" to refer to the start and tail of a list, or that bash uses "ls" and "cd" to list and change directories. Those are far less intuitive than "position: absolute".

by _bxg1 8y ago

mekoka 8y ago

> Some of the names are unintuitive, sure. Though I don't think the ones you provided are in particular; I think your distaste for those is subjective. Relative and absolute... Is there a CSS book or tutorial that doesn't take a jab at these names when explaining positioning?

_bxg1 8y ago
Relative means "relative to the default position", which makes perfect sense to me. Absolute means "I'm explicitly setting this position", which also makes fairly good sense. There are probably better names they could've used for "absolute", but there are also much worse ones. But the point is, these are just names. What really matters is the quality of the underlying system. You don't hear people complaining that Lisp uses made-up strings like "car" and "cdr" to refer to the start and tail of a list, or that bash uses "ls" and "cd" to list and change directories. Those are far less intuitive than "position: absolute".