Why is CSS the way it is? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#21

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:09 AM UTC

The biggest issue with CSS I think for many is the emergent complexity from the interaction of different properties. Especially those inherited through the cascade. Much of this emergent complexity is not always consistent cross-browser.

Additionally, there are often many ways to accomplish the same result but fully understanding the implications of certain approaches over others is also a headache at times.

Speaking personally, something touched on in this article, is that many things don't really make sense to me or at least I don't find them intuitive - and I've been working with CSS daily for 14 years. It does often feel like a scatterbrained, horse designed by committee type of thing.

It's like CSS only makes sense when you learn to see the problem through the eyes of whomever specced out that particular feature, which can also be said for trying to read CSS written by another developer.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#22

Post by watwut » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

giantDinosaur wrote: post #6

atoav wrote: post #5

I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…

You can't work out the logical consequences of seemingly obvious properties. That is unlike 95% of most programming I do in any programming language I've ever used. Since I have zero interest in learning unintuitive interfaces to GUI design, I have zero interesting in excusing CSS. It is not difficult to learn, it is not difficult to understand in terms of conceptual understanding, it is downright tedious to learn th…

For me the hard part is remembering all the arbitrary rules and special conditions. Most tech "makes sense", once you get it it has system that helps you to remember stuff.

Css has semblance of system, but mostly it us a lot of rules with no rhyme slapped together.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#23

Post by moray » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:19 AM UTC

talkinghead wrote: post #11

Great read, a related and entertaining CSS talk is CODE GENIUS - Cascading Shit Show by Jacob Thornton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iniwPUEbPUM

I also recommend Kevin Powell videos:

https://www.youtube.com/kepowob/featured

I learned some obscure CSS features from him.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#24

Post by rimliu » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:20 AM UTC

atoav wrote: post #5

I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…

CSS clicked for me from the very start. It was always fun, I never had problems with it (aside from the browser bugs, of course). Maybe problem others have with it is not because of the nature of the CSS, but because of people ignoring that nature and refusing to learn it and trying to carry over their experience with other technologies to CSS.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#25

Post by tacone » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

atoav wrote: post #5

I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…

IIRC the parent selector has big performance implications, so its spec has been postponed for years

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#26

Post by rimliu » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:46 AM UTC

colonelspace wrote: post #4

pjmlp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was called Flash.

Everyone loves to hate Flash, but as an environment to create things it was actually great. It was the player that wasn’t great.

I wish everyone in web developemnt stopped only looking at the thing that makes it easier for themselves and start to focus on what's best for the users.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#27

Post by inopinatus » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:48 AM UTC

This is a somewhat superficial history that only briefly touches on origins, and doesn't discuss the fundamental idea behind CSS, from which everything else is, directly or otherwise, a consequence.

Two decades ago I was overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last document styling language anyone would ever need.

Unfortunately following an incident with a broken Lisp machine, a liquid lunch, and an unlicensed particle accelerator, I became trapped in a parallel universe where the HTML ERB anointed CSS by mistake during a drunken night out in Oslo.

The fundamental concept of CSS (best revealed by H.W.Lie's thesis IMO[1]) was to create a rich and versatile and non-Turing-complete set of structural selectors in lieu of DSSSL's recursive logic, and to allow styles to overlay one another; two design choices that only by the application of gallons of irony can explain why most web pages are composed of a bunch of nested DIV elements with hashed IDs and overloaded semantic class attributes, and everyone compiles their assets into a static file.

[1] https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#28

Post by layoutIfNeeded » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

preommr wrote: post #20

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Flash was owned by Adobe, while Flutter is owned by the same company that controls the HTML and HTTP standards, so it would be better fit.

> by the same company that controls the HTML and HTTP standards So your solution is to dig the hole even deeper?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#29

Post by schwartzworld » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:56 AM UTC

rimliu wrote: post #26

colonelspace wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone loves to hate Flash, but as an environment to create things it was actually great. It was the player that wasn’t great.

I wish everyone in web developemnt stopped only looking at the thing that makes it easier for themselves and start to focus on what's best for the users.

Flash websites were awesome. the player needed work, but for end users there web was a much more interesting and diverse place

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#30

Post by johannes1234321 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:56 AM UTC

colonelspace wrote: post #4

pjmlp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was called Flash.

Everyone loves to hate Flash, but as an environment to create things it was actually great. It was the player that wasn’t great.

Yes, Flash was a great tool to create stuff. (I only used it in Macromedia times)

This however also lead to an abuse and for a while you had websites, fully in flash which broke so many things (deep linking/bookamrks, browser history, etc.) combined with unintuitive navigation and slowness due to animations ... plain overuse of an otherwise good technology.