Why is CSS the way it is?

Post by fk6aaa545c » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

goto11 wrote: post #95

I think most of the complaints against CSS is because don't understand the problems CSS is trying to solve. It is not just a question of putting text and colors on a screen. You can do that with Postscript or PDF or SVG or several other comparatively simple technologies. CSS is trying to tackle a much harder problem: - Layout and typography which can be readable on various devices with wildly different dimensions, as…

Post by ehaliewicz2 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #10

giantDinosaur wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it is not difficult to understand in terms of conceptual understanding So what is your point? What you lack is motivation to make things pretty so it's not CSS's fault :)

Post by ehaliewicz2 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #60

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #21

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…

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and horizontal centring is really hard, and that's why CSS is terrible"[1], and all it shows is that their skills are out of date.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…

Post by notahacker » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

scarecrowbob wrote: post #74

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…

Post by azangru » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

strbean wrote: post #121

azangru wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "cascade" was, for sure, a mistake. Aren't global styles only possible because of the cascade and the child elements inheriting from parent elements? Without cascade, wouldn't you have to re-declare your font size and font family, and line-height, etc. on every element of your markup?

The cascade is not inheritance. The cascade is deciding the order to apply rules/stylesheets in, and which rule applies here: html: Blah css: a { color: red; } div a { color: blue; } Where the font color ends up being blue because `div a` is more specific than `a`.