Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Languages Which Almost Became CSS
131–136 of 136 posts
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#132I 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.
Which is very sad, because it's a totally sane way. Have a set of different low-level languages to describe a screen layout, a paper layout, a audio layout for the blind, a single high-level language that describes content, and three transformations written in a very powerful yet pretty much declarative language. What not to like?
For example, sometimes we may need to enumerate certain things, e.g. headings. Normally this is a part of the final typesetting package (LaTeX or MS Word, whatever). But with XSLT and XSL/FO we have a different share of responsibilities: XSLT computes the numbers and XSL/FO typesets what it's given, so it has one less thing to worry about. This is great, because typesetting is complex enough already.
Besides, XSLT way of creating styles (xsl:attribute-set) is one of most elegant I've seen. It's very simple (one element and one attribute) and very powerful at the same time: you can easily inherit styles and/or use mixins or combine these approaches and there's no ambiguity. Besides, it's generic.
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#133> Contrary to popular perception, Mosaic was not the first graphical browser. It was predated by ViolaWWW Neither was ViolaWWW the first grahical browser. In fact the very first browser by Sir Tim Berners-Lee was already a graphical browser (even with WYSIWYG edit mode later known from Frontpage/Dreamweaver) - made possible by thr advanced NeXTSTEP operating system and its window builder IDE (nowadays known as OSX/ma…
When people talk about "graphical Web browsers" in a historical context, they're not just talking about browsers that run in a GUI. The term specifically refers to browsers that can display graphics and text in the same window. The earliest versions of WorldWideWeb (Tim Berners-Lee's original browser) couldn't do this. It used NSText (NeXTStep's native text-display object) for displaying pages, and at the time NSText…
In Aalto Uni there is popular legend about Erwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise
I don't know what to believe.
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#134Earlier 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…
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
I'm pretty sure I had the same book! The "superhero" was called "CyberSarge", yes?
https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Kids-Ted-Pedersen/dp/0600590...
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I'm pretty sure I had the same book! The "superhero" was called "CyberSarge", yes? https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Kids-Ted-Pedersen/dp/0600590...
YES!!!! That's the one! Holy crap, well done, I never thought I'd see it again! Oh man what a nostalgia trip:
"GEEK: A geek is someone who is really excited by computers and proud of it" -- this is the reason I was proud to call myself a geek from 6yo onwards :)
Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do that (of sort) in Firefox by Preference | Content | Colors * change the Text & Background colors * uncheck system colors * always override
Yeah, but the problem is that modern pages are written in such a way that that almost always displays garbage. I tried to do it for a few weeks, but it was terrible looking.
I've set it up to follow Solarized dark color scheme.
Yes it'll take some time to get used BUT totally worth it, especially when you're reading text a lot :D
I did test with light themes, I have to agree it looks worse compared to dark themes