4 ms·

Everything is still going to be tree-shaken, minified and mangled before being transferred to the client; no matter how much bells and whistles are added to web

Everything is still going to be tree-shaken, minified and mangled before being transferred to the client; no matter how much bells and whistles are added to web languages. Why not just make it decoupled and efficient? Compiling code isn't a radical idea.

alwillis 4y ago
As pointed out in the article, the nesting syntax has to work in every setting that CSS works in today and has always worked in—from a hobbyist working alone on a side project to teams working on huge code bases and everything in between. Because of the universality of the web, anyone from a kid in a developing country with a netbook and a text editor to teams at Fortune 500 companies need to be able to author CSS. It's a non-starter to require all kinds of tooling—preprocessors, compilers, task runners, packagers, etc. to create web content. You can use these tools if it makes sense for a particular situation but it should always be optional. BTW, browsers already use Just In Time compilers [1] to render CSS as efficiently as possible; all of the tooling you mentioned is mostly to reduce the size of CSS payloads over a network. Regardless if you minify CSS or not, its rendering speed isn't going to change. With these tools, there's no compiling happening anyway, just transforming one text format (Sass) to another text format CSS. It's not like WebAssembly where code is compiled into a byte-code format that runs in a virtual machine. [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/3271/webkit-css-selector-jit-compiler/ https://webkit.org/blog/3271/webkit-css-selector-jit-compile...
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  > As pointed out in the article, the nesting syntax has to work in every setting that CSS works in today and has always worked in—from a hobbyist working alone on a side project to teams working on huge code bases and everything in between. Yeah, and I’m saying it shouldn’t work anywhere at all. > Because of the universality of the web, anyone from a kid in a developing country with a netbook and a text editor to teams at Fortune 500 companies need to be able to author CSS. Compiling messy unoptimized code into efficient code is somehow bad for kids with netbooks? I don’t follow. > It's a non-starter to require all kinds of tooling—preprocessors, compilers, task runners, packagers, etc. to create web content. You can use these tools if it makes sense for a particular situation but it should always be optional. Why? So the whole modern world should be stuck with outdated decisions from 1980s and be horribly inefficient because there is one kid in Djibouti who can’t download VSCode and learn to click F5 to compile things? > BTW, browsers already use Just In Time compilers [1] to render CSS as efficiently as possible; all of the tooling you mentioned is mostly to reduce the size of CSS payloads over a network. Regardless if you minify CSS or not, its rendering speed isn't going to change. Yet they are still unable to implement Sass syntax. So why not just get rid of this fundamental limitation that just makes no sense and that barely made sense even 10 years ago?

alwillis 4y ago

As pointed out in the article, the nesting syntax has to work in every setting that CSS works in today and has always worked in—from a hobbyist working alone on a side project to teams working on huge code bases and everything in between. Because of the universality of the web, anyone from a kid in a developing country with a netbook and a text editor to teams at Fortune 500 companies need to be able to author CSS. It's a non-starter to require all kinds of tooling—preprocessors, compilers, task runners, packagers, etc. to create web content. You can use these tools if it makes sense for a particular situation but it should always be optional. BTW, browsers already use Just In Time compilers [1] to render CSS as efficiently as possible; all of the tooling you mentioned is mostly to reduce the size of CSS payloads over a network. Regardless if you minify CSS or not, its rendering speed isn't going to change. With these tools, there's no compiling happening anyway, just transforming one text format (Sass) to another text format CSS. It's not like WebAssembly where code is compiled into a byte-code format that runs in a virtual machine. [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/3271/webkit-css-selector-jit-compiler/ https://webkit.org/blog/3271/webkit-css-selector-jit-compile...

LudwigNagasena 4y ago
> As pointed out in the article, the nesting syntax has to work in every setting that CSS works in today and has always worked in—from a hobbyist working alone on a side project to teams working on huge code bases and everything in between. Yeah, and I’m saying it shouldn’t work anywhere at all. > Because of the universality of the web, anyone from a kid in a developing country with a netbook and a text editor to teams at Fortune 500 companies need to be able to author CSS. Compiling messy unoptimized code into efficient code is somehow bad for kids with netbooks? I don’t follow. > It's a non-starter to require all kinds of tooling—preprocessors, compilers, task runners, packagers, etc. to create web content. You can use these tools if it makes sense for a particular situation but it should always be optional. Why? So the whole modern world should be stuck with outdated decisions from 1980s and be horribly inefficient because there is one kid in Djibouti who can’t download VSCode and learn to click F5 to compile things? > BTW, browsers already use Just In Time compilers [1] to render CSS as efficiently as possible; all of the tooling you mentioned is mostly to reduce the size of CSS payloads over a network. Regardless if you minify CSS or not, its rendering speed isn't going to change. Yet they are still unable to implement Sass syntax. So why not just get rid of this fundamental limitation that just makes no sense and that barely made sense even 10 years ago?