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…
Don't forget the gigabytes of code spent trying to work around the cascade and produce some kind of framework for styling "components" that doesn't leak crazy state from the enclosing context (but does inherit the good stuff). The "cascade" was, for sure, a mistake. Not being in this world, though, I do wonder why there's been no real attempt to fix this from the ground up? I mean... it wouldn't really be "hard" to c…
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#171The cascade is what makes it possible to override parts of a stylesheet. Without this, each stylesheet would have to define all styles for every html element in use. It would be an enormous amount of boilerplate in each and every stylesheet.