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CSS has been a job security/browser lock-in club for the longest time. It's one of the last areas of influence W3C (now W3C, Inc.) has over web standardization,

CSS has been a job security/browser lock-in club for the longest time. It's one of the last areas of influence W3C (now W3C, Inc.) has over web standardization, with Google paying and pulling the strings, their other puppet being a loose group of individuals having a long term investment in writing web specs on github called whatwg. There is/was the Houdini API proposal as a way to plug JavaScript into CSS low-level layout already rather than invent a thousand microsyntaxes for CSS equivalents of programming language constructs such as CSS custom properties, calc(), trigonometric functions, degenerative uses of media queries, and other crap. The idea being to return to reasonable coverage for document presentation, and an extension API for web apps (as opposed to sites) requiring JavaScript anyway as a 80/20 trade-off. But any notion of mental discipline is lost on CSS heads really. It already starts with the very invention of CSS as a redundant syntax for markup attributes, then declaring an unsound structure/presentation dichotomy as a syntactic feature after the fact. A plausible explanation for CSS absurdity might be that evolution of HTML the markup language was organizationally blocked so many years that everything around it had to cater for its stagnancy and ossification. Even the inventor of CSS had opposed against custom properties already, formally questioning their necessity.

chatmasta 4y ago
"Job security" seems like an unfair way to describe backwards compatibility. Most of the quirks of the Web platform are due to it having some of the strictest backwards compatibility standards of any software. For the most part, you can view a GeoCities site from 2005 in the latest Chrome browser and it will render the same as it did 18 years ago, assuming all the assets are still loadable. IMO, the Web as a platform has done a great job maintaining this standard, and it's only been in recent years that all the browsers became "evergreen" and are able to add new changes at a rapid pace. I definitely wouldn't hold this against the people responsible for maintaining (!) the CSS spec. Now, should there be some entirely new design language that starts fresh without any of these assumptions, and free from technical debt? Well, maybe, but then again that's kind of what each new version of the CSS spec does when it introduces new rules, which is much easier now with all browsers evergreen. (edited to replace "green field" with "evergreen")
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  I'm willing to concede backwards compat, but how is browser tech "green field" when we haven't seen new browsers developed from scratch for well over a decade (^1) and have even lost two long-standing browser codebases (MS, Opera) during that time period? ^1 with laudable exceptions that haven't reached any reportable status/alignment with specs yet after years of work however, and possibly never will as browser tech scope expands every day like the frontier of the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light
  - chatmasta 4y ago
    I think I might be misremembering the term. It's not "greenfield," but "green" something, and is used to refer to browsers updating relatively simultaneously, which only began in the past few years. EDIT: I love ChatGPT. The term I meant to use is "evergreen." It refers to browsers that automatically update in the background, so everyone is using the latest version of their chosen browser. I'll edit my original comment.
    - tannhaeuser 4y ago
      Ah ok, you mean evergreen, in that case everything is ok in browser land ;) > it's only been in recent years that all the browsers became "evergreen" and are able to add new changes at a rapid pace The "rapid pace" is due to basically only three browsers left, and the only winner is the browser cartel we're enduring.
      - chatmasta 4y ago
        > the only winner is the browser cartel As a user, I sympathize and agree wholeheartedly with this argument. But as a developer, I feel like one of the winners. I certainly don't miss the days of adding complexity to my build tooling or limiting which features I can use, just because I still need to support some inexplicably popular browser that last received updates half a decade ago. I'm not sure what the answer is, but perhaps some crazy person out there should consider building their own browser from scratch. That's the only way we'll get more open competition in the market...

chatmasta 4y ago

"Job security" seems like an unfair way to describe backwards compatibility. Most of the quirks of the Web platform are due to it having some of the strictest backwards compatibility standards of any software. For the most part, you can view a GeoCities site from 2005 in the latest Chrome browser and it will render the same as it did 18 years ago, assuming all the assets are still loadable. IMO, the Web as a platform has done a great job maintaining this standard, and it's only been in recent years that all the browsers became "evergreen" and are able to add new changes at a rapid pace. I definitely wouldn't hold this against the people responsible for maintaining (!) the CSS spec. Now, should there be some entirely new design language that starts fresh without any of these assumptions, and free from technical debt? Well, maybe, but then again that's kind of what each new version of the CSS spec does when it introduces new rules, which is much easier now with all browsers evergreen. (edited to replace "green field" with "evergreen")

tannhaeuser 4y ago
I'm willing to concede backwards compat, but how is browser tech "green field" when we haven't seen new browsers developed from scratch for well over a decade (^1) and have even lost two long-standing browser codebases (MS, Opera) during that time period? ^1 with laudable exceptions that haven't reached any reportable status/alignment with specs yet after years of work however, and possibly never will as browser tech scope expands every day like the frontier of the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light
- chatmasta 4y ago
  I think I might be misremembering the term. It's not "greenfield," but "green" something, and is used to refer to browsers updating relatively simultaneously, which only began in the past few years. EDIT: I love ChatGPT. The term I meant to use is "evergreen." It refers to browsers that automatically update in the background, so everyone is using the latest version of their chosen browser. I'll edit my original comment.
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    Ah ok, you mean evergreen, in that case everything is ok in browser land ;) > it's only been in recent years that all the browsers became "evergreen" and are able to add new changes at a rapid pace The "rapid pace" is due to basically only three browsers left, and the only winner is the browser cartel we're enduring.
    - chatmasta 4y ago
      > the only winner is the browser cartel As a user, I sympathize and agree wholeheartedly with this argument. But as a developer, I feel like one of the winners. I certainly don't miss the days of adding complexity to my build tooling or limiting which features I can use, just because I still need to support some inexplicably popular browser that last received updates half a decade ago. I'm not sure what the answer is, but perhaps some crazy person out there should consider building their own browser from scratch. That's the only way we'll get more open competition in the market...