Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is CSS the way it is?

increment.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 173 posts

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#71

Post by onion2k »

philistine wrote: post #66
onion2k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest issue with CSS I think for many is.. ..that they haven't looked at it for years and assume it's still as hard to use as it was when it was new. In any discussion about CSS someone will eventually post that "vertical and horizontal centring is really hard, and that's why CSS is terrible"[1], and all it shows is that their skills are out of date. [1] Seriously, it's as easy as "display: grid; place-items: c…

I’m no expert here, but I think the model of always adding new syntax doesn’t help people realize that CSS has gotten so much better.

Given the choice between making life easier for developers who are too lazy to learn some new syntax and literally breaking the whole of the internet because websites stop rendering correctly with the changed meaning of things, I think I'd side with the adding more syntax. It's not even a hard decision.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#72

Post by _4jlx »

I have noticed a commonality between systems that are unintuitive to use like git and CSS: they didn't sufficiently mimic nature, or common everyday concepts.

Say you design a new relational DB. You want all the postgres and SQL people to switch so you adopt SQL as the querying language. Your DB becomes so popular that it eventually gains +80% market share. Many people now have to learn SQL as their first querying language and now you've created another git.

Another scenario is a system being appropriated for something else like CSS was (?).

Copying your competitors is simply not a guarantee that your system will stand the test of time. The only constant is nature.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#73

Post by treeman79 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #63
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> broke so many things (deep linking/bookamrks, browser history, etc.) Truly we have failed to learn from past mistakes.

Modern JavaScript frameworks have support for this and a result of Flash's experience is that browsers have specific APIs for that ... however: each new generation of developers has to learn :)

Yes but JavaScript generations are like every six months.

I took a 3 year break from anything Frontend. Felt like I had gone through a time machine.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#74

Post by scarecrowbob »

jandrese wrote: post #47

IMHO this article inadvertently shows why people hated CSS at the start. He spends a lot of time talking about color space conversions that few developers care about and Unicode filtering that even fewer people know about but glosses over basic layout by mentioning how floats allow for better inline images. It’s like the designers didn’t even think about layout because that problem was already solved with HTML tables…

".But the problem was that when CSS came out there it came with the mantra of thou shalt not use tables for layout, but CSS was only specified enough to wrap text around an image, so designers had to torture inline-blocks and floats to try to achieve even basic layout tasks. This ended up bringing out a lot of edge case incompatibilities and fights with the layout engine."

This does not match my recollections of CSS in the mid 90s.

My recollection is that people in general just laid out a document like you'd lay out a word document, and as such the minimal amount of floating that people did was not that difficult.

I recall a) when table-based layouts became very popular, and b) when they became very unpopular and we had to start doing all kinds of funky things with float to avoid them.

But returning to the birth of CSS if all you want to do is to put an image in a word processor do and have the text wrap around it, float is not too bad. If you want to design a layout system around it, it sucks.

So, like, to understand "why floats" in a historical sense, it's important to understand that the kind of layouts that tables (and yeesh, I can't even remember what they were called... frames maybe) were used to achieve didn't exist when CSS was first being used...

it was more like the generic tools in a basic rich text editor.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#75

Post by goto11 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #34
inopinatus wrote: post #27

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 do…

Wow, I'd absolutely love to hear more about this if you've got something to share ... To win a sizable portion of HNers, it suffices to say that DSSSL was the Scheme-based styling and transformation language of SGML (implemented by Jade/OpenJade). I can only imagine where we'd be now if DSSSL had won over CSS and similar FOSI-like ad-hoc styling languages (or even SGML's own LINK process declarations that however was…

> I can only imagine where we'd be now if DSSSL had won over CSS

We probably wouldn't have dynamic HTML then.

DSSSL is basically the same idea as the XSLT/FO where document in semantic markup is transformed into a different purely presentational markup language (like PDF if it was SGML-based). It is a one-way operation on the whole document, and made totally sense for the intended use case which was to prepare document for print publishing.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#76

Post by acdha »

Davertron wrote: post #50
Izkata wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because very few learn CSS right. In particular: the box model. All the devs I know that struggle with CSS don't understand it. The ones that don't have issues have internalized it and don't need to think about it much anymore. The box model is one of those fundamental building blocks you really should be learning very early on, a bit like an "if" statement in imperative languages - you can hack around it wi…

You can learn to do arithmetic with roman numerals but that doesn't mean its good.

This is more like saying you don't need to learn algebra and then saying you hate math because it takes too much work to get the answer you need. A surprising number of developers are under the mistaken belief that not learning how the web works is saving them time and over the years I've been amazed by how many people will instead unquestioningly spend years playing bug whack-a-mole with megabytes of JavaScript sturggling to replicate built-in behaviours.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#77

Post by goto11 »

jandrese wrote: post #47

IMHO this article inadvertently shows why people hated CSS at the start. He spends a lot of time talking about color space conversions that few developers care about and Unicode filtering that even fewer people know about but glosses over basic layout by mentioning how floats allow for better inline images. It’s like the designers didn’t even think about layout because that problem was already solved with HTML tables…

> It’s like the designers didn’t even think about layout because that problem was already solved with HTML tables. But the problem was that when CSS came out there it came with the mantra of thou shalt not use tables for layout

This is an unfortunate misunderstanding. CSS did initially aim to provide at least same expressive power as presentational HTML allowed at the time. So it provided the display:table layout model so designers didn't have to use HTML tables for layout. Unfortunately Internet Explorer (which was dominant at the time) did not support this property for a very long time.

Floats were never intended as a general purpose layout tool, but ended up like that for designers which wanted to use pure CSS but at the same time had to cater to IE users.

While flexbox and flexgrid are more powerful and flexible, display:table actually support a lot of the layout functionality designers were clamoring for, like easy to implement expanding sidebars and such. The problem was not with the CSS spec but with the lack of support in the dominant browser.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#78

Post by acdha »

mwexler wrote: post #39

Ever notice how the phrase "I love how CSS works..." is inevitably followed by "but x or y really sucks, is too complex, is inconsistent..." I can't recall meeting a cheerleader for CSS the way you do for, say, lisp/scheme or forth. Sure, everything has gaps, and fans are the first to point them out... but CSS fans always have a lot of fuel to bring up in the flaws dept. It's starting to feel like css is approach ema…

It's because CSS is a widespread distributed system which you don't entirely control. Programming language fanboys are usually just not being entirely forthright but they are also usually speaking from easy mode where they control all of the parts of the system, can upgrade at will, and don't need to support anyone else's projects.

Languages like Lisp, Scheme, or Forth have both a selection bias (mostly used by fans) and they just aren't that widely used. If millions of people were writing code expected to run with a standardized API on billions of clients where it might take 5 years or more to drop support for an old version, they'd find more things to complain about. It's not a coincidence that the best thing which happened to CSS was the rise of the evergreen browsers shaving years off of the time between a feature being released and someone being able to rely on it existing.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#79

Post by acdha »

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.

> It was the player that wasn’t great.

And the standard libraries, cross-platform support, and industry-trailing IDE. They didn't even have a stable debugger for years but that didn't stop them from charging $800/seat to see if they'd fixed any of the problems.

Re: Why is CSS the way it is?

#80

Post by matsemann »

jandrese wrote: post #47

IMHO this article inadvertently shows why people hated CSS at the start. He spends a lot of time talking about color space conversions that few developers care about and Unicode filtering that even fewer people know about but glosses over basic layout by mentioning how floats allow for better inline images. It’s like the designers didn’t even think about layout because that problem was already solved with HTML tables…

I remember spending ages on various ways to implement "the golden layout" or whatever it was called. Edit: Holy Grail. One header on top, then three columns, and then a footer. And the middle of the three columns should scale with screen width and screen height, such that the rightmost column was at the edge, and the footer was at the bottom of the screen if content was less than screen height.

And then a-list-aparts "faux columns" to make the columns seem to have the same height.

Edit: It was the "Holy Grail" it was named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design) So hard to do that it even has its own Wikipedia page, heh

Post reply on HN