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Three decades ago I was similarly overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to

Three decades ago I was similarly overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last document styling language anyone would ever need. Unfortunately following an incident with a broken Lisp machine, a liquid lunch, and an unlicensed particle accelerator, I became trapped in a parallel universe where the HTML ERB anointed CSS by mistake during a drunken night out in Oslo. The fundamental concept of CSS (best revealed by H.W.Lie's thesis IMO¹) was to create a rich and versatile and non-Turing-complete set of structural selectors in lieu of DSSSL's recursive logic, and to allow styles to overlay one another; two design choices that only by the application of gallons of irony can explain why most web pages are composed of a bunch of nested DIV elements with hashed IDs, overburdened class attributes, and assets compiled into static files. [1] https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf

antod 3y ago
> Unfortunately following an incident with a broken Lisp machine, a liquid lunch, and an unlicensed particle accelerator, I became trapped in a parallel universe where the HTML ERB anointed CSS by mistake during a drunken night out in Oslo. Mostly though you're upset because respectable computer scientists didn't get invited to those sorts of parties.
toyg 3y ago
CSS is a classic case of road to hell paved by good intentions. "We'll have one style for the browser and one for printing!" - but turns out that nobody really gives a crap about printing, and when they do they want stuff printed exactly like it looks on screen. "Forget tables, we'll have stuff floating around the screen!" - but turns out that there are more requirements for positioning rules that can be contained in anyone's philosophy. Etc etc...

antod 3y ago

> Unfortunately following an incident with a broken Lisp machine, a liquid lunch, and an unlicensed particle accelerator, I became trapped in a parallel universe where the HTML ERB anointed CSS by mistake during a drunken night out in Oslo. Mostly though you're upset because respectable computer scientists didn't get invited to those sorts of parties.

toyg 3y ago

CSS is a classic case of road to hell paved by good intentions. "We'll have one style for the browser and one for printing!" - but turns out that nobody really gives a crap about printing, and when they do they want stuff printed exactly like it looks on screen. "Forget tables, we'll have stuff floating around the screen!" - but turns out that there are more requirements for positioning rules that can be contained in anyone's philosophy. Etc etc...