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If the designers of Unix had seen the light of CSS, they wouldn’t have bothered with shells and file descriptors and C and Awk and all that composable flotsam.
by pavlov 3y ago
If the designers of Unix had seen the light of CSS, they wouldn’t have bothered with shells and file descriptors and C and Awk and all that composable flotsam.
They’d just created a single program, call it the “Central Software System”, and defined thousands of properties that let you control its state machine to produce the output you need.
Presto! The perfect computer. If for some reason someone needs a new kind of output, it can be added to the Central Software System via a friendly decade-long committee process.
And if the properties happen to conflict in how they define some output, well, the one company in the world who has actually implemented all of this “open standard” can decide what happens in that case.
- sebstefan 3y agoYou can say that about almost any abstraction layer
- smokel 3y agoThey would probably also use regular expressions and incomprehensible $ and \ escape codes to retain some of the fun.
- datascienced 3y agoIs this a sysvinit vs systemd rant?
- HeckFeck 3y ago$ /etc/init.d/initwar start Starting initwar (via systemd) Sad sysadmin noises
- dartos 3y agoNixos?
- afavour 3y agoIt’s almost - almost! - as if the designers of Unix and of CSS work in completely different scenarios and with completely different constraints! Almost!
- pavlov 3y agoAnd with this convenient domain excuse, CSS has managed to become a system that’s not a fit for any domain. It’s incomprehensible to visual designers, incomprehensible to programmers, and incomprehensible to document authors. On the upside, it provides a massive moat of sunk cost and implicit implementation dependency around Chromium, so at least there’s that.
- afavour 3y agoI’m a web programmer and I find it comprehensible. Sure there are times I need to go to the docs but vast majority of the time I can work with it just fine. I’d agree that it probably is incomprehensible to many visual designers but unfortunately so is code in general. CSS is complex, especially these days, but I feel like those who don’t work with the web every day simply don’t get to experience it often enough to know that it does make sense within its domain. But sure, if you want, CSS is a conspiracy theory to ensure the dominance of Google.
- Joker_vD 3y agoOf course it is, there is even the word "masonry" in TFA's name!
- pavlov 3y agoIt’s not a conspiracy. It’s a well-intentioned but poorly thought-out design for basic 1990s word processing layouts that accidentally blew up to describe entire application GUIs, and now it’s not in the interest of the stakeholders to try to do anything about it. It’s the same kind of growth pattern as government bureaucracies. Those are largely not conspiracies either, despite the occasional optics.
- alpaca128 3y agoDid the designers of Unix also have to ensure compatibility with billions of devices connected worldwide running different software stacks? Also as mentioned in the linked article the masonry layout is already possible with JS, no decades-long committee process needed. It's just about standardizing something frequently used.
- kevincox 3y agoIt's fine, just run ./configure before compiling.
- btbuildem 3y agoThe point GP is making is that they didn't have to, because the architecture made it infinitely configurable while remaining coherent. Billions of connected devices worldwide do indeed run on *nix with a mad variety stacked on top.
- klabb3 3y agoCSS may be complex, but you get a huge bang for the buck in terms of UX, rendering performance, flexibility, accessibility, compared to most drawing and layout systems. You could argue against border-radius and flex as well, but Im glad we’re past clearfix and gifs for corners. Does masonry layout qualify for becoming standard? I don’t know.
- blackbear_ 3y ago> compared to most drawing and layout systems This is just an accident of history and not because CSS has anything that makes it intrinsically better than the alternatives.
- jampekka 3y agoAnything other than existing. CSS is quite a mess, and I would welcome a backwards-incompatible new layouting system, but all the alternatives out there are a lot worse.
- klabb3 3y agoAccumulated garbage for backwards compatibility? Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. I’m not saying css is intrinsically better (what does intrinsic even mean in this case?). It’s pragmatically better than anything else I’ve seen. It’s dead simple to learn and use, and (almost) fully declarative, and degrades gracefully. Just show me a better alternative and I’ll change my mind.
- doctor_eval 3y agoI want to say something about monolithic kernels but I’m too scared.
- jampekka 3y agoTrusting us plebs with universal turing machines is unacceptable. There's a config/app/saas/appliance for everything you need to need.
- mejutoco 3y agoWhat is the composable unix approach for layout/graphical interfaces?
- mrighele 3y agoTcl/Tk ? When you had enough of using text as the single data structure in a shell, you can start doing the same with a GUI toolkit.
- wizzwizz4 3y agoTk has basically the same model as CSS, except that it's not strictly hierarchical. (Though CSS has that now, too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@scope https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@scope)
- wodenokoto 3y agoWhat dynamic layout system is it that ships in posix again?
- cjk2 3y agoUm, err, POSIX.
- jojobas 3y agoWas rather hard to tell if you're joking or not, seeing how every trivial program today wants to have Electron with it.
- lumb63 3y agoI didn’t realize this was satire until the second paragraph. Well done. As a firmware engineer who is trying to build a website in his spare time, I find CSS absurd. I’ve found SCSS and Sass make it much more bearable. The ability to represent a hierarchy concisely is awesome.
- meowface 3y agoCSS is adding native nesting: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_nesting/Using_CSS_nesting https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_nesting...
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- micromacrofoot 3y agothe committee process is probably down to about 5ish years now? I feel like people who complain about this weren't around when the process was "20 years from now when we can drop IE support" — velocity has improved significantly