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Do you have a better suggestion? I agree with your frustration about this article being newsworthy (it's 2013! How are we still figuring out vertical centering

by JakeSc 13y ago

Do you have a better suggestion? I agree with your frustration about this article being newsworthy (it's 2013! How are we still figuring out vertical centering?!), though I would argue that CSS is great for its original use case and certainly has its place today. Why is it bad that CSS is entrenched in the Web? Like any development technology, CSS has a learning curve and has several shortcomings (like vertical positioning), but I think it's a fine tool for the job and struggle to come up with something better.

gcv 13y ago
CSS is not great for its original use case. It was poorly designed by a group of people who chose to ignore existing understanding of layout models. The TeX boxes+glue model, had it been adapted for CSS, would have made all the absurdities and nasty layout workarounds of the last 20 years unnecessary.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  I like to point to the failure of keeping table headers visible at the top of a page as you scroll down a table. If I had a book where a table spanned multiple pages and the header row wasn't included at the top of the page, I would throw the book out. A scrollable table with fixed headers is something that Visual Basic supported in 1997.
  - anon1385 13y ago
    Unsurprisingly people have been trying to get browsers to support for that for years and years e.g. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2002May/0153.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2002May/0153.h... Of course it wasn't a use case of interest to the mighty browser vendor cabal so it has never been considered a priority. It does seem like it will be possible soon though with position:sticky https://air.mozilla.org/intern-presentation-ford/ https://air.mozilla.org/intern-presentation-ford/ We should probably prepare some sacrifice to the browser vendor gods to thank them for this small morsel they have thrown us.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    Position:sticky will fix that once it's supported in a critical mass of browsers.
    - Pxtl 13y ago
      And it only took a decade or two!
- Aldo_MX 13y ago
  > It was poorly designed by a group of people who chose to ignore existing understanding of layout models. Can you please elaborate how tables were the understanding of layout models 15 years ago? The web was not thought to be interactive at that era, but to be printed, it's not the fault of the old specs that the web progressed significantly fast.
  - svachalek 13y ago
    Who said the web was designed to be printed? (1) The "H" in HTML stands for hypertext. (2) When has a web page ever printed well?
    - pstuart 13y ago
      But there was no client side language to do anything with it.
    - Aldo_MX 13y ago
      Who said the web was designed to be printed? I said the web was tought to be printed, all the effort of CSS (circa 98) was about styling the web in a way that made sense for print, not for interaction.
  - gcv 13y ago
    I said nothing about tables. I specifically referred to the TeX boxes+glue model. In addition, if the web was truly meant to be printed — an assertion I have never heard before; it sounds blatantly false — then not adopting the massively successful TeX system sounds even more insane.
- yannis 13y ago
  Please read Håkon Wium Lie's PhD thesis http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/ http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/ to understand the reasoning behind the development of CSS. I think it was going in the right direction, although the ride got bumpy when committees and commercial interests started getting involved. Its major objective was to achieve separation of content from presentation which it achieved and I think you being unfair in your statement about CSS not being great for its original use case. CSS did borrow concepts from TeX at the time. I agree with you that if it had borrowed more from TeX maybe we would have avoided Javascript and also we would have benefited from an updated model for TeX and I said so at http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/6463/963 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/6463/963. Maybe is time to revisit and revamp both.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    > Its major objective was to achieve separation of content from presentation which it achieved and I think you being unfair in your statement about CSS not being great for its original use case. I have never seen this fully implemented except in the simplest of blog-engine layouts and toy examples. There is always some pollution of the markup, at the very least in the form of the ordering of elements. A template-based approach would've provided the same semantics a lot sooner than a decade of half-baked CSS hacks.

by JakeSc 13y ago

gcv 13y ago

CSS is not great for its original use case. It was poorly designed by a group of people who chose to ignore existing understanding of layout models. The TeX boxes+glue model, had it been adapted for CSS, would have made all the absurdities and nasty layout workarounds of the last 20 years unnecessary.

Pxtl 13y ago
I like to point to the failure of keeping table headers visible at the top of a page as you scroll down a table. If I had a book where a table spanned multiple pages and the header row wasn't included at the top of the page, I would throw the book out. A scrollable table with fixed headers is something that Visual Basic supported in 1997.
- anon1385 13y ago
  Unsurprisingly people have been trying to get browsers to support for that for years and years e.g. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2002May/0153.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2002May/0153.h... Of course it wasn't a use case of interest to the mighty browser vendor cabal so it has never been considered a priority. It does seem like it will be possible soon though with position:sticky https://air.mozilla.org/intern-presentation-ford/ https://air.mozilla.org/intern-presentation-ford/ We should probably prepare some sacrifice to the browser vendor gods to thank them for this small morsel they have thrown us.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  Position:sticky will fix that once it's supported in a critical mass of browsers.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    And it only took a decade or two!
Aldo_MX 13y ago
> It was poorly designed by a group of people who chose to ignore existing understanding of layout models. Can you please elaborate how tables were the understanding of layout models 15 years ago? The web was not thought to be interactive at that era, but to be printed, it's not the fault of the old specs that the web progressed significantly fast.
- svachalek 13y ago
  Who said the web was designed to be printed? (1) The "H" in HTML stands for hypertext. (2) When has a web page ever printed well?
  - pstuart 13y ago
    But there was no client side language to do anything with it.
  - Aldo_MX 13y ago
    Who said the web was designed to be printed? I said the web was tought to be printed, all the effort of CSS (circa 98) was about styling the web in a way that made sense for print, not for interaction.
- gcv 13y ago
  I said nothing about tables. I specifically referred to the TeX boxes+glue model. In addition, if the web was truly meant to be printed — an assertion I have never heard before; it sounds blatantly false — then not adopting the massively successful TeX system sounds even more insane.
yannis 13y ago
Please read Håkon Wium Lie's PhD thesis http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/ http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/ to understand the reasoning behind the development of CSS. I think it was going in the right direction, although the ride got bumpy when committees and commercial interests started getting involved. Its major objective was to achieve separation of content from presentation which it achieved and I think you being unfair in your statement about CSS not being great for its original use case. CSS did borrow concepts from TeX at the time. I agree with you that if it had borrowed more from TeX maybe we would have avoided Javascript and also we would have benefited from an updated model for TeX and I said so at http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/6463/963 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/6463/963. Maybe is time to revisit and revamp both.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  > Its major objective was to achieve separation of content from presentation which it achieved and I think you being unfair in your statement about CSS not being great for its original use case. I have never seen this fully implemented except in the simplest of blog-engine layouts and toy examples. There is always some pollution of the markup, at the very least in the form of the ordering of elements. A template-based approach would've provided the same semantics a lot sooner than a decade of half-baked CSS hacks.