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Languages Which Almost Became CSS

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Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#111

Post by Samis2001 »

marssaxman wrote: post #72
zackbloom wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to think about who the audience was (Unix users) and what they were used to (Gopher, irc, plaintext email). With all of those technologies they were used to being in control of the styling of what they consumed. One person's styles for irc could be completely different than another's, and that was fine. The idea that things should be published with one rigid style which must be used to consume it was fo…

I suppose this explains why I've never really liked CSS or the design-heavy web: I was never willing to give up that control over my machine. I still resent the way modern "user-agents" aka browsers give every jackass designer out there more control over what my machine is doing than they retain for me.

I feel your pain due to a different reason. After seeing how the major Linux UI toolkits support consistent theming of all the programs using them, original styles/themes be damned, the lack of a consistently-applied theming system/mechanism among web applications is all the more obvious. With web pages this generally isn't an issue (barring annoying/just crap ones) but with web applications, why should their visual appearance and design be arbitarily (from my perspective anyway) decided by a developer/designer with no effective way to alter/change/override this either cleanly or consistently over multiple applications.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#112

Post by steveklabnik »

paragraft wrote: post #89

What a great post. I really appreciate these longer digs into the past that go behind the 'what' to explain the how & why of where we got where we are; and just as much the futures that could have been and why they didn't happen. I keep thinking there's room for a decent series discussing the evolution of Rust, since that design process was such a public thing.

I have a talk at the ACM's conference about the history of Rust, but with that much time, there's only so much you can do. The RFC process has helped document a lot, but there's still years of history before that.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#113

Post by unexistance »

wtbob wrote: post #102
zackbloom wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to think about who the audience was (Unix users) and what they were used to (Gopher, irc, plaintext email). With all of those technologies they were used to being in control of the styling of what they consumed. One person's styles for irc could be completely different than another's, and that was fine. The idea that things should be published with one rigid style which must be used to consume it was fo…

What burns me up is that CSS was supposed to allow site authors to have sensible defaults for their pages while enabling me to override them, and yet when I set a dark theme in Firefox all hell breaks loose. Honestly, the web was better end-user experience for me on links in a terminal: I was able to read text and submit forms, and that's all I really need.

You can do that (of sort) in Firefox by

Preference | Content | Colors

* change the Text & Background colors

* uncheck system colors

* always override

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#114

Post by dmvaldman »

pcwalton wrote: post #61
Animats wrote: post #27

Layout should have been constraint-oriented, not procedural. You should be able to express "Bottom of this box is adjacent to top of that box", and such. All those constraints go into a constraint engine, and a layout is generated. This is something a WYSIWYG editor can generate. To get a sense of how this could work, try sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor (there's a free 30 day demo) You can specify that a point must…

CSS layout is slow enough as it is. Adding all the features you propose here would make the situation far worse. The fact that CSS layout mostly follows a top-down (and parallelizable!) width assignment phase followed by a botton-up height assignment phase is not something to throw away lightly.

Do you have a reference for this?

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#115

Post by Semiapies »

FuturePromise wrote: post #108

I spent a long time learning XSL/XSLT. The theory was we'd represent the data on a web page with XML, and then determine how it's to be displayed with XSL/XSLT. I think browsers still support it, but it never caught on.

Did a little of that, myself.

A lot of the fundamental premise there did actually happen, just with different technologies. Today, there's a lot of sending structured data (in forms like JSON) to server- or client-side templates and components that render in a declarative way.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#116

Post by jguegant »

pcwalton wrote: post #63
peatmoss wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we have a do-over on the web? I've seen (and even nominally participated) in something of a resurgence of Gopher as something of a shadow web for nostalgia-addled geeks. Gopher isn't an awesome protocol, but I love anything that recaptures the spirit and decentralized nature of the old web. At my curmudgeon-iest I like to imagine we carve off our own web where S-expressions reign, there is no Google, and a millio…

And such a web would be far slower. Restyling is usually the slowest part of the rendering pipeline in an optimized implementation. Throwing arbitrary tree transformations made with a Scheme interpreter into the mix would be totally irresponsible without looking at what the consequences would be for performance.

Isn't it the way Qt + QML works?

Last time I checked, this stack wasn't particularly slow. I would also express the same style in much less lines of code than HTML + CSS.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#117

Post by girvo »

peatmoss wrote: post #22
Grue3 wrote: post #11

DSSSL looks amazing. Truly a shame it didn't catch on. Maybe we'd have a client-side Lisp instead of Javascript too.

Can we have a do-over on the web? I've seen (and even nominally participated) in something of a resurgence of Gopher as something of a shadow web for nostalgia-addled geeks. Gopher isn't an awesome protocol, but I love anything that recaptures the spirit and decentralized nature of the old web. At my curmudgeon-iest I like to imagine we carve off our own web where S-expressions reign, there is no Google, and a millio…

When I was 6 years old, in 1996, my parents gave me a book about "Cyberspace" to go along with our dial-up internet connection (on our Pentium 100mhz Windows 95 computer!). This book showed me Gopher, and MUDs, and changed my life! I wish I could remember the name of it, it was a bright yellow cover with a superhero on it, I think.

I miss Gopher, in a rose-tinted glasses nostalgia-driven way

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#118

Post by underwater »

Animats wrote: post #27

Layout should have been constraint-oriented, not procedural. You should be able to express "Bottom of this box is adjacent to top of that box", and such. All those constraints go into a constraint engine, and a layout is generated. This is something a WYSIWYG editor can generate. To get a sense of how this could work, try sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor (there's a free 30 day demo) You can specify that a point must…

Well recent versions of CSS and HTML are limited by backwards compatibility. 20 years ago it was taken for granted that styling meant applying decoration, fonts and colors to a text, not building an application or a design tool.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#119

Post by agumonkey »

wtbob wrote: post #100
agumonkey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I die, my first question to god will be 'sir, why the hate on lisp?'. I expect the answer to involve testing of some kind.

I love Lisp, and I love s-expressions, and I honestly can't viscerally understand why others don't. From listening to my teammates' comments, I think that it has something to do with how they register visual patterns in code. Lisp really does seem to be lots of irritating silly parentheses to them: where I just see sculpted code-shapes, they see a mess of undifferentiated parens and symbols. I wonder if there really…

It also comes from which system they used. Writing lisp outside of supporting editors is indeed a nice pain. People prefer to think in terms of blocks of lines rather than (nested (groups)). Culture shock.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#120

Post by Ygg2 »

PeCaN wrote: post #31
patrickmay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineering management that prevented Scheme in the browser should never be forgiven: https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/

In some alternate universe the management didn't stop Eich: Scheme became the lingua franca of the web. Smug Array Weenies criticize Scheme for being “insufficiently APL-like”, while pure functional programmers criticize APL for being “insufficiently Haskell-like”. Legions of Scheme programmers write mutually unintelligible code, though still manage to criticize Haskell for being “insufficiently Lisp-like”. Prolog fa…

That, or it ends up with several different Scheme flavors. And you get "Works best with MSScheme and IE" in 2016.
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