4 ms·

This article does a great job reinforcing the fact that the w3c has made an absolute mess of the css spec, and that browser vendors continue to implement crap.

by jscheel 12y ago

This article does a great job reinforcing the fact that the w3c has made an absolute mess of the css spec, and that browser vendors continue to implement crap. It's disheartening at best to think about css. I say this as I am wrangling YASCI (yet another stupid css issue).

Pxtl 12y ago
Sadly, http://giveupandusetables.com http://giveupandusetables.com is no longer up, because I always liked pointing to that. The amount of time we spend fighting with CSS to do things that are simple is insane. The web is not a well-designed platform. It grew organically out of a document system under the stewardship of a million browser developers with no leadership, and it shows. It's a series of hacks upon hacks upon hacks that only make a reasonable, decent computing platform by the combined might of the entire software industry making tools and frameworks and JavaScript optimizing compilers and whatnot for it.
- deleted 12y ago
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- null_ptr 12y ago
  Client-side web technologies are rotten and ill-designed, a mountain of patches and inconsistencies. That's why it's so painful to see people try to shoehorn JavaScript everywhere just because it's the unfortunate status quo.
- deleted 12y ago
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matthewmacleod 12y ago
CSS isn't really all that bad, and the trope is getting boring now. Hindsight is 20/20, and it would have been difficult to foresee that the web would become an application platform in 1994, when the concept was being introduced to the web. CSS was primarily intended as a specification for styling documents, and not for implementing application layout - I would wager that most of the objections actually focus around it's unsuitability for this role. That said, it's obvious that CSS is not currently optimal for the use cases that emerged. That's why we've had so much work on new versions, which attempt to solve some of the long-standing objections. From my perspective as a developer, it's working relatively well; even minor changes in the general availability of things like border-box sizing have made a huge difference to the ease of doing application layout in CSS, and the situation only continues to get better.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  CSS is bad and hindsight is not required. Consider all the obvious page layout things that everyone wants, such as centering, columnar text, non-moving navigation elements, footers, and so forth that are either unsupported or require rocket science tricks to get half-working. And that's without getting into the inobvious requirements that they've had at least ten years to grapple with. To be fair, some of CSS's shortcomings follow from HTML design errors that are equally egregious (and in some cases have been magnified by HTML5). E.g. It ahould have been possible to create decent looking navigation elements in HTML with no CSS or Javascript, but still isn't.
  - matthewmacleod 12y ago
    Consider all the obvious page layout things that everyone wants, such as centering, columnar text, non-moving navigation elements, footers, and so forth that are either unsupported or require rocket science tricks to get half-working. These features are all now available in the latest CSS specs. Yes, it's taken a while to get there, but I absolutely dispute that these features are "obvious." To be fair, some of CSS's shortcomings follow from HTML design errors that are equally egregious (and in some cases have been magnified by HTML5) I don't in most cases agree that problems in HTML are "design errors," so much as "features it turned out we wanted that we didn't think we did." E.g. It ahould have been possible to create decent looking navigation elements in HTML with no CSS or Javascript, but still isn't. Again, I don't agree that this is something HTML should be involved with.
    - Tloewald 12y ago
      All the layout features used in publishing are obvious requirements for a document layout technology, especially when folks from Adobe, et al, are on the relevant committees. All the layout features used in applications are obvious requirements for web applications. It's perfectly reasonable to leave out a lot of stuff from early versions of a product or standard, but we're a long, long way past that. > I don't agree that this is something HTML should be involved with. HTML is involved with it, it's just badly involved. Either don't provide presentation controls or do it properly. Your opinion doesn't matter because there are facts on the ground.

by jscheel 12y ago

Pxtl 12y ago

Sadly, http://giveupandusetables.com http://giveupandusetables.com is no longer up, because I always liked pointing to that. The amount of time we spend fighting with CSS to do things that are simple is insane. The web is not a well-designed platform. It grew organically out of a document system under the stewardship of a million browser developers with no leadership, and it shows. It's a series of hacks upon hacks upon hacks that only make a reasonable, decent computing platform by the combined might of the entire software industry making tools and frameworks and JavaScript optimizing compilers and whatnot for it.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
null_ptr 12y ago
Client-side web technologies are rotten and ill-designed, a mountain of patches and inconsistencies. That's why it's so painful to see people try to shoehorn JavaScript everywhere just because it's the unfortunate status quo.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

matthewmacleod 12y ago

CSS isn't really all that bad, and the trope is getting boring now. Hindsight is 20/20, and it would have been difficult to foresee that the web would become an application platform in 1994, when the concept was being introduced to the web. CSS was primarily intended as a specification for styling documents, and not for implementing application layout - I would wager that most of the objections actually focus around it's unsuitability for this role. That said, it's obvious that CSS is not currently optimal for the use cases that emerged. That's why we've had so much work on new versions, which attempt to solve some of the long-standing objections. From my perspective as a developer, it's working relatively well; even minor changes in the general availability of things like border-box sizing have made a huge difference to the ease of doing application layout in CSS, and the situation only continues to get better.

Tloewald 12y ago
CSS is bad and hindsight is not required. Consider all the obvious page layout things that everyone wants, such as centering, columnar text, non-moving navigation elements, footers, and so forth that are either unsupported or require rocket science tricks to get half-working. And that's without getting into the inobvious requirements that they've had at least ten years to grapple with. To be fair, some of CSS's shortcomings follow from HTML design errors that are equally egregious (and in some cases have been magnified by HTML5). E.g. It ahould have been possible to create decent looking navigation elements in HTML with no CSS or Javascript, but still isn't.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  Consider all the obvious page layout things that everyone wants, such as centering, columnar text, non-moving navigation elements, footers, and so forth that are either unsupported or require rocket science tricks to get half-working. These features are all now available in the latest CSS specs. Yes, it's taken a while to get there, but I absolutely dispute that these features are "obvious." To be fair, some of CSS's shortcomings follow from HTML design errors that are equally egregious (and in some cases have been magnified by HTML5) I don't in most cases agree that problems in HTML are "design errors," so much as "features it turned out we wanted that we didn't think we did." E.g. It ahould have been possible to create decent looking navigation elements in HTML with no CSS or Javascript, but still isn't. Again, I don't agree that this is something HTML should be involved with.
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    All the layout features used in publishing are obvious requirements for a document layout technology, especially when folks from Adobe, et al, are on the relevant committees. All the layout features used in applications are obvious requirements for web applications. It's perfectly reasonable to leave out a lot of stuff from early versions of a product or standard, but we're a long, long way past that. > I don't agree that this is something HTML should be involved with. HTML is involved with it, it's just badly involved. Either don't provide presentation controls or do it properly. Your opinion doesn't matter because there are facts on the ground.