3 ms·

Extremely misleading title. These are not "mistakes" as much as subjective preferences. A better title would be "some random person's opinion about what should

Extremely misleading title. These are not "mistakes" as much as subjective preferences. A better title would be "some random person's opinion about what should be changed in the CSS spec".

soperj 6y ago
lol. Yes, a random person who some how managed to post on the CSS working group. A random person who's been a css spec writer since 2004 (17 years).
Geminidog 6y ago
Not only that, every language and design ever made on the face of the earth doesn't have any design mistakes at all. Everything is just an opinion and subjective preference. In fact point out any mistake to me ever made and I'll just tell you that it's just your opinion and I have a different one. I'll take it a step further and say that people can hold opinions but those opinions can be categorically wrong or right. So this article is about one persons subjective opinion, but all his subjective opinions are definitively right and anyone who shares opposing opinions is wrong. Just want to caveat this post with the fact that I'm just sharing my subjective opinion on this issue, you can agree or disagree. But if you disagree with me then you are categorically mistaken, but again it's just my opinion you have the freedom to form your own opinion. Maybe it's pointless to call something an objective opinion because literally that's what everything is. The man calls aspects of css a design mistake, you disagree, prove to me why he's wrong
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  The logical extrapolation of your argument also says that there’s no such thing as a bug—just software that doesn’t do what you in particular, or perhaps everyone, wanted and expected it to do. Also you suggest that there’s no such thing as a design mistake, yet that opinions can be categorically wrong or right. These seem to me to be mutually incompatible. At the very least, the first part necessarily restricts the type of opinions that can be categorically wrong, so that the designer of something can’t correctly declare something a mistake. One popular list of design mistakes in a language is https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/. Many of them can be quibbled over, but many of them are unequivocally at the very least suboptimal, where the behaviour that was complained of was quite indefensible—and commonly has been fixed since, because in many cases it was considered a bug. (And so you see how the line between a design mistake and a bug can be fairly arbitrary.) Another example I’d use of an unequivocally bad design is MySQL’s Unicode charsets: that you had utf8, then utf8mb3 and finally utf8mb4. utf8 and utf8mb3 were both stupidly broken from the very start, utterly unfit for purpose. They should probably never have been invented, but at the very least they should have been named differently—tens or hundreds of thousands have learned the hard way that “utf8” is dangerously broken, and that “utf8mb4” is what they need.
  - Geminidog 6y ago
    That's just your subjective opinion on the matter and you are free to have it. I share different thoughts on the issue though. In all seriousness my post is lampooning the absurdity of calling something an objective opinion because anything can be classified as such and I'm subtly hinting at the fact that it's pointless and we should have the capability to label certain things as wrong or right rather then call it just a collection of opinions. I think you're mistaken here, we are actually in agreement. All of Css is a design mistake and guess what? I'm not saying that's my opinion, that's fact.

Extremely misleading title. These are not "mistakes" as much as subjective preferences. A better title would be "some random person's opinion about what should be changed in the CSS spec".

soperj 6y ago

lol. Yes, a random person who some how managed to post on the CSS working group. A random person who's been a css spec writer since 2004 (17 years).

Geminidog 6y ago

Not only that, every language and design ever made on the face of the earth doesn't have any design mistakes at all. Everything is just an opinion and subjective preference. In fact point out any mistake to me ever made and I'll just tell you that it's just your opinion and I have a different one. I'll take it a step further and say that people can hold opinions but those opinions can be categorically wrong or right. So this article is about one persons subjective opinion, but all his subjective opinions are definitively right and anyone who shares opposing opinions is wrong. Just want to caveat this post with the fact that I'm just sharing my subjective opinion on this issue, you can agree or disagree. But if you disagree with me then you are categorically mistaken, but again it's just my opinion you have the freedom to form your own opinion. Maybe it's pointless to call something an objective opinion because literally that's what everything is. The man calls aspects of css a design mistake, you disagree, prove to me why he's wrong

chrismorgan 6y ago
The logical extrapolation of your argument also says that there’s no such thing as a bug—just software that doesn’t do what you in particular, or perhaps everyone, wanted and expected it to do. Also you suggest that there’s no such thing as a design mistake, yet that opinions can be categorically wrong or right. These seem to me to be mutually incompatible. At the very least, the first part necessarily restricts the type of opinions that can be categorically wrong, so that the designer of something can’t correctly declare something a mistake. One popular list of design mistakes in a language is https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/. Many of them can be quibbled over, but many of them are unequivocally at the very least suboptimal, where the behaviour that was complained of was quite indefensible—and commonly has been fixed since, because in many cases it was considered a bug. (And so you see how the line between a design mistake and a bug can be fairly arbitrary.) Another example I’d use of an unequivocally bad design is MySQL’s Unicode charsets: that you had utf8, then utf8mb3 and finally utf8mb4. utf8 and utf8mb3 were both stupidly broken from the very start, utterly unfit for purpose. They should probably never have been invented, but at the very least they should have been named differently—tens or hundreds of thousands have learned the hard way that “utf8” is dangerously broken, and that “utf8mb4” is what they need.
- Geminidog 6y ago
  That's just your subjective opinion on the matter and you are free to have it. I share different thoughts on the issue though. In all seriousness my post is lampooning the absurdity of calling something an objective opinion because anything can be classified as such and I'm subtly hinting at the fact that it's pointless and we should have the capability to label certain things as wrong or right rather then call it just a collection of opinions. I think you're mistaken here, we are actually in agreement. All of Css is a design mistake and guess what? I'm not saying that's my opinion, that's fact.