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I don't have a reference for this, but I always got the impression that CSS was intentionally limited to help browsers implementers write efficient layout engin
by Camillo 14y ago
I don't have a reference for this, but I always got the impression that CSS was intentionally limited to help browsers implementers write efficient layout engines with as few pathological cases as possible. For instance, if you could specify the value of object attributes using arbitrary expressions with other objects' attributes as input, it would be very easy to have circular dependencies, unexpectedly high computational costs, contradictions, and so on. Just defining how to solve a contradiction would have made the standard much more complex, and error reporting would have been a nightmare.
- Arelius 14y agoI think that while that may have originally been the case, I feel that we've long since passed the point of particularly efficient layout engines with as few pathological cases as possible. Particularly computational costs, since I think you'll find many sites doing some part of layout in javascript.
- ajanuary 14y agoHence new layout techniques in CSS3.
- Arelius 14y agoI think that while that may have originally been the case, I feel that we've long since passed the point of particularly efficient layout engines with as few pathological cases as possible. Particularly computational costs, since I think you'll find many sites doing some part of layout in javascript.