4 ms·

Come on, man. "There were three units (and 5 more that that I personally never used and didn't realize were critical for proper print.css stylesheets because I

Come on, man. "There were three units (and 5 more that that I personally never used and didn't realize were critical for proper print.css stylesheets because I never printed anything). Today there are 18! A six-fold increase" You mean two-fold. Hyperbole doesn't work when you're flat out lying about the numbers with the evidence for that lie in the same sentence. And how many of those 18 are commonly used? Because it's not "all of them", not everything on the web needs all of them (a web page doesn't need physical dimensions, an app doesn't need pixels, you don't use every unit for everythi9ng). Complaining about "what it can do" when you don't use what it can do doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Learn what you need to use, ignore the parts you don't need. Learn those through trivia and incidental "oh huh I didn't know that" moments.

samwillis 3y ago
I don't think the OP is necessarily arguing against the growth of CSS per se, I think they are arguing that CSS development is being pushed forward by an increasingly small group of people and companies. CSS growth is in my view good, but it does sound like having more diverse people and organisations influencing it would be good for the community.
czx4f4bd 3y ago
The post doesn't say "There were three units". That's a quote you made up. The post says "the original CSS specification included 3 relative units". That is factually true. The original CSS spec lists only em, ex, and px as supported relative units, which are distinct from the five absolute units you accused them of leaving out.[0] Accusing someone of lying while lying about what they said is a bad look. The author also has a footnote mentioning that there are actually 36 relative length units in CSS now, so it's actually a 12-fold increase in relative unit types. Lastly, I don't think the author is even complaining about the number of units. He obviously has reservations about it, but the main point is to illustrate the growing complexity of CSS over time. > These raw numbers tell an underlying story; websites now appear in a number of different shapes, sizes and dimensions, and CSS needs to account for that. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#length-units https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#length-units

samwillis 3y ago

I don't think the OP is necessarily arguing against the growth of CSS per se, I think they are arguing that CSS development is being pushed forward by an increasingly small group of people and companies. CSS growth is in my view good, but it does sound like having more diverse people and organisations influencing it would be good for the community.

czx4f4bd 3y ago

The post doesn't say "There were three units". That's a quote you made up. The post says "the original CSS specification included 3 relative units". That is factually true. The original CSS spec lists only em, ex, and px as supported relative units, which are distinct from the five absolute units you accused them of leaving out.[0] Accusing someone of lying while lying about what they said is a bad look. The author also has a footnote mentioning that there are actually 36 relative length units in CSS now, so it's actually a 12-fold increase in relative unit types. Lastly, I don't think the author is even complaining about the number of units. He obviously has reservations about it, but the main point is to illustrate the growing complexity of CSS over time. > These raw numbers tell an underlying story; websites now appear in a number of different shapes, sizes and dimensions, and CSS needs to account for that. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#length-units https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#length-units