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I agree with you entirely on the abandoning of conventions with HTML. I haven't paid much attention to multi-column layouts in CSS over the years but my impress

I agree with you entirely on the abandoning of conventions with HTML. I haven't paid much attention to multi-column layouts in CSS over the years but my impression is that it's gone from tables to CSS floats to whatever CSS does now that I'm not familiar with. Browsers are typically backwards compatible so this isn't that big of a deal to me. But I have no idea if what's regarded as the best practice today will be seen as primitive in 15 years. > The fact that there's no HTML-native footnoting / endnoting convention ... bothers me. I've seen people use the HTML5 <aside> element for sidenotes, styled with CSS. Some even make them responsive, folding neatly into the text as the viewport shrinks. I'm not sure if this is the intended use for <aside> but the result is reasonable and I intend to do the same. If you're set on footnotes, though, yes, I don't know a native implementation. Equation support with MathML is okay in principle but not practice. I'd like to have equations without external dependencies (MathJax's JS alone is like 750 kB!), but that's not possible until Chrome decides to catch up with Firefox and Sarafi on MathML. I've been thinking about just using MathML as-is (no external math renderer), and if Chrome users complain, I'll tell them to get a better browser. ;-) Maybe that'll help some Chrome users understand why they should test their websites in other browsers.

dredmorbius 7y ago
CSS columns are actually ... mostly ... pretty useful: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Columns/Using_multi-column_layouts https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Columns... My preference is to use them with @media queries to create more or fewer columns within auxiliary elements (headers, footers, asides), usually to pretty good effect. Multi-column body text is largely an abombination. For images, I'm still largely sticking to floats. I've done some sidenote styling that I ... think I like. I don't remember how responsive this CodePen is or isn't though I've created some pretty responsive layouts based on it: https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/OVmKZX https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/OVmKZX I consider equation support a lost cause.
WorldMaker 7y ago
Semi-relatedly, I think even the linear form of UnicodeMath [1] is very readable, and it would be great if there was more support for building it up into nicer presentation forms in the browser wild (MathJax has had it on the backlog since at least 2015, for instance), as that seems to me to be a better "fallback" situation than raw MathML given its readability when not built up. [1] http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.pdf http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.pdf > I haven't paid much attention to multi-column layouts in CSS over the years but my impression is that it's gone from tables to CSS floats to whatever CSS does now that I'm not familiar with. CSS Grid [2] is the happiest path today. It's a really happy path (I want these columns, this wide, done). CSS Flexbox [3] is a bit older and nearly as happy a path. Some really powerful things can be used with the combination of both, especially in responsive design (a dense two dimensional grid on large widescreen displays collapsing to a simple flexbox "one dimensional" flow, for example). Flexbox may be seen as primitive in a few years, but Grid finally seems exactly where things should have always been (and what people were trying to accomplish way back when with tables or worse framesets). Even then, Flexbox may be mostly seen as primitive from the sense of "simple lego/duplo tool" compared to Grid's more precise/powerful/capable tools. [2] https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid [3] https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
- btrettel 7y ago
  Thanks for mentioning UnicodeMath. That does seems like a better fallback solution than raw MathML. It appears there's a newer version of the document you linked to that was posted on HN, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687936 I'll also look more closely at CSS Grid.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Thanks for mentioning grid, as that's a tool I've not looked at myself. CSS columns and Grid are not entirley substitutable, though they share some properties. I see Columns as a way of flowing text within some bounding box, whilst Grid is preferred for arranging textual components on a page, more akin to paste-up in Aldus Pagemaker (am I dating myself) though on the rubber sheet of the HTML viewport rather than on fixed paper sizes.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Yeah, they are very different things. One is for text/inline flow and the other block flow. As a fan of CSS Columns (multicol) I hope that the interaction between Columns and Grid gets better standardized. (In my case I wanted better support for embedding Grids in columns; my tests worked in everything but Firefox. So it is interesting to me that Firefox seems the most interested in pushing multicol forward as a standard [1], since it stopped being a Trident/Spartan priority when Windows 8.1/10 abandoned multicol as a key UX principle of Windows 8 apps.) [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/multiple-column-layout-and-column-span-in-firefox-71/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/multiple-column-layout-and...

dredmorbius 7y ago

CSS columns are actually ... mostly ... pretty useful: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Columns/Using_multi-column_layouts https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Columns... My preference is to use them with @media queries to create more or fewer columns within auxiliary elements (headers, footers, asides), usually to pretty good effect. Multi-column body text is largely an abombination. For images, I'm still largely sticking to floats. I've done some sidenote styling that I ... think I like. I don't remember how responsive this CodePen is or isn't though I've created some pretty responsive layouts based on it: https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/OVmKZX https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/OVmKZX I consider equation support a lost cause.

WorldMaker 7y ago

Semi-relatedly, I think even the linear form of UnicodeMath [1] is very readable, and it would be great if there was more support for building it up into nicer presentation forms in the browser wild (MathJax has had it on the backlog since at least 2015, for instance), as that seems to me to be a better "fallback" situation than raw MathML given its readability when not built up. [1] http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.pdf http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.pdf > I haven't paid much attention to multi-column layouts in CSS over the years but my impression is that it's gone from tables to CSS floats to whatever CSS does now that I'm not familiar with. CSS Grid [2] is the happiest path today. It's a really happy path (I want these columns, this wide, done). CSS Flexbox [3] is a bit older and nearly as happy a path. Some really powerful things can be used with the combination of both, especially in responsive design (a dense two dimensional grid on large widescreen displays collapsing to a simple flexbox "one dimensional" flow, for example). Flexbox may be seen as primitive in a few years, but Grid finally seems exactly where things should have always been (and what people were trying to accomplish way back when with tables or worse framesets). Even then, Flexbox may be mostly seen as primitive from the sense of "simple lego/duplo tool" compared to Grid's more precise/powerful/capable tools. [2] https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid [3] https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

btrettel 7y ago
Thanks for mentioning UnicodeMath. That does seems like a better fallback solution than raw MathML. It appears there's a newer version of the document you linked to that was posted on HN, by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687936 I'll also look more closely at CSS Grid.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Thanks for mentioning grid, as that's a tool I've not looked at myself. CSS columns and Grid are not entirley substitutable, though they share some properties. I see Columns as a way of flowing text within some bounding box, whilst Grid is preferred for arranging textual components on a page, more akin to paste-up in Aldus Pagemaker (am I dating myself) though on the rubber sheet of the HTML viewport rather than on fixed paper sizes.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Yeah, they are very different things. One is for text/inline flow and the other block flow. As a fan of CSS Columns (multicol) I hope that the interaction between Columns and Grid gets better standardized. (In my case I wanted better support for embedding Grids in columns; my tests worked in everything but Firefox. So it is interesting to me that Firefox seems the most interested in pushing multicol forward as a standard [1], since it stopped being a Trident/Spartan priority when Windows 8.1/10 abandoned multicol as a key UX principle of Windows 8 apps.) [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/multiple-column-layout-and-column-span-in-firefox-71/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/multiple-column-layout-and...