5 ms·

CSS sucks because the fundamental ideas were a) abandoned, and b) somewhat bad. The abandoned ideas I have in mind were all around user stylesheets. I know so

by taeric 9mo ago

CSS sucks because the fundamental ideas were a) abandoned, and b) somewhat bad. The abandoned ideas I have in mind were all around user stylesheets. I know some folks are going to dig up an amazing demo. In the wild, this just never materialized. Remember back when browsers would give you a built in way to manage your own stylesheets for sites? The bad idea, to me, is the whole recursive concept for sizing. I legit cannot think of a good reason to have a constantly recursive application of sizes. Which, I think if you stuck with the standard elements when CSS was started, you could argue that this makes a lot of sense. As soon as we all accepted that a tree depth of 20+ divs is just normal, that went out the window. Which, fair that you could blame the latter on HTML going off the rails with how we explode things into a DOM. Doesn't change the fact that trying to set relative sizes is almost certainly going to bite you in the ass. Edit: I should also add the hilarious fight between the different browsers on default box-sizing. Or how we spun our wheels for a long time before adding flex/grid to the standard. How many years was the recommendation not to use table for layouts, without having a good alternative for the times when it was the easiest to reason way to design something?

PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
I think this is more or less totally wrong, based on my experience with native desktop development, which CSS has been racing to catch up with/overtake/replace. Nested widget heirarchies that are 20 deep are a dime a dozen in native desktop development. If you want to argue that this reflects poor UI/UX design, be my guest, but that's the way it has been for 30 years or more. Web design wasn't like this in 1995, but as the platform has evolved to support almost any kind of UI-driven application development, it has also picked up these long-utilized models from that world. What CSS has added, which I view as an entirely good thing, is to extend the notion of rule-driven box packing as the fundamental underlying layout model. GTK realized the sense in doing this when the development of GTK3 began, and other desktop toolkits on all platforms have picked up either all or most of the same fundamental model for layout. Native and web-based UI implementations are ever converging on the same models, and CSS has been the crystalizing force in that convergence, along with its recursive, fundamental box packing (sizing & positioning) concepts.
- taeric 9mo ago
  Nested is fine. Setting text size to be 50% of parent just rarely does what you want it to do. Well, to be precise, it does exactly what you want for the first week that you have designed it and have not started adding all sorts of other widgets to a site. Such that, inevitably, you just want to have large swaths of text that are at given sizes. You don't care how nested the thing is to get you there. I remember learning the different Java Swing layout managers back in the day. Again, being nested was fine. That said, if you were doing a large layout, you were probably reaching for GridBagLayout. Back in 1999... (And I recall that SWT layouts were even simpler?) I'm willing to concede that many of the ideas in CSS are good. At the least, benign. User stylesheets were just flat out a rake in field, though. And I stand by the claim that percentage sizes is largely a massive foot gun. Edit: I should say that I find native interfaces took a massive nose dive in many ways when we abandoned so many interface builders. I have no idea how nested your typical MS Access form was or was not. I know that designing and wiring them up was far easier than what I typically see today.
  - odie5533 9mo ago
    I haven't thought about this video in years, but your mention brought me back! "Totally gridbag": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkJR9lmjqQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkJR9lmjqQo
    - taeric 9mo ago
      This one actually makes me curious on what "layouts" flash supported. I never wrote in it, but some folks made some amazing designs using it.
  - Izkata 9mo ago
    > Well, to be precise, it does exactly what you want for the first week that you have designed it and have not started adding all sorts of other widgets to a site. Such that, inevitably, you just want to have large swaths of text that are at given sizes. You don't care how nested the thing is to get you there. Shared library components is where this could work - each individual application would be able to scale the component's size to what it needs.
1718627440 9mo ago
user.css is a thing?
- taeric 9mo ago
  Per the silly AI answer on Google, not really? You can enable it on Firefox easily enough. Everywhere else? Good luck. Even in Firefox, the dream of meaningful styles across sites is largely dead, I thought.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 1718627440 9mo ago
    > Per the silly AI answer on Google, not really? There are people who read that? > Everywhere else? Good luck. Same as with alternate stylesheets or a reasonable line of death. For all the annoying things Mozilla does, Firefox is still a great browser and for some measures the only shop in town. > meaningful styles across sites You can also modify the browser chrome with it, and I think UBlock Origin uses it for modifying the page. Also some settings are exposed via a UI, so also lawmen not knowing about user.css might still use the user (agent) stylesheet.

by taeric 9mo ago

PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago

I think this is more or less totally wrong, based on my experience with native desktop development, which CSS has been racing to catch up with/overtake/replace. Nested widget heirarchies that are 20 deep are a dime a dozen in native desktop development. If you want to argue that this reflects poor UI/UX design, be my guest, but that's the way it has been for 30 years or more. Web design wasn't like this in 1995, but as the platform has evolved to support almost any kind of UI-driven application development, it has also picked up these long-utilized models from that world. What CSS has added, which I view as an entirely good thing, is to extend the notion of rule-driven box packing as the fundamental underlying layout model. GTK realized the sense in doing this when the development of GTK3 began, and other desktop toolkits on all platforms have picked up either all or most of the same fundamental model for layout. Native and web-based UI implementations are ever converging on the same models, and CSS has been the crystalizing force in that convergence, along with its recursive, fundamental box packing (sizing & positioning) concepts.

taeric 9mo ago
Nested is fine. Setting text size to be 50% of parent just rarely does what you want it to do. Well, to be precise, it does exactly what you want for the first week that you have designed it and have not started adding all sorts of other widgets to a site. Such that, inevitably, you just want to have large swaths of text that are at given sizes. You don't care how nested the thing is to get you there. I remember learning the different Java Swing layout managers back in the day. Again, being nested was fine. That said, if you were doing a large layout, you were probably reaching for GridBagLayout. Back in 1999... (And I recall that SWT layouts were even simpler?) I'm willing to concede that many of the ideas in CSS are good. At the least, benign. User stylesheets were just flat out a rake in field, though. And I stand by the claim that percentage sizes is largely a massive foot gun. Edit: I should say that I find native interfaces took a massive nose dive in many ways when we abandoned so many interface builders. I have no idea how nested your typical MS Access form was or was not. I know that designing and wiring them up was far easier than what I typically see today.
- odie5533 9mo ago
  I haven't thought about this video in years, but your mention brought me back! "Totally gridbag": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkJR9lmjqQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkJR9lmjqQo
  - taeric 9mo ago
    This one actually makes me curious on what "layouts" flash supported. I never wrote in it, but some folks made some amazing designs using it.
- Izkata 9mo ago
  > Well, to be precise, it does exactly what you want for the first week that you have designed it and have not started adding all sorts of other widgets to a site. Such that, inevitably, you just want to have large swaths of text that are at given sizes. You don't care how nested the thing is to get you there. Shared library components is where this could work - each individual application would be able to scale the component's size to what it needs.

1718627440 9mo ago

user.css is a thing?

taeric 9mo ago
Per the silly AI answer on Google, not really? You can enable it on Firefox easily enough. Everywhere else? Good luck. Even in Firefox, the dream of meaningful styles across sites is largely dead, I thought.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- 1718627440 9mo ago
  > Per the silly AI answer on Google, not really? There are people who read that? > Everywhere else? Good luck. Same as with alternate stylesheets or a reasonable line of death. For all the annoying things Mozilla does, Firefox is still a great browser and for some measures the only shop in town. > meaningful styles across sites You can also modify the browser chrome with it, and I think UBlock Origin uses it for modifying the page. Also some settings are exposed via a UI, so also lawmen not knowing about user.css might still use the user (agent) stylesheet.