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Hell Yes CSS

wizardzines.com

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Re: Hell Yes CSS

#71

Post by randomsearch »

goto11 wrote: post #67
randomsearch wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't fully formed in my mind yet so go easy: Intuition is linked to elegance, an elegantly designed language is intuitive. An elegant language is one that starts with a few core principles and from that derives the rest of the language. Lisp is an example of a programming language that does this beautifully well. Usually (always?) such core principles themselves are taken from mathematics. After all, maths is h…

This is more a failure of the tutorials than of CSS itself though. CSS has a pretty simple and elegant core. You just have to understand the problems it was designed to solve. - Readable documents at any screen dimensions or resolution (i.e. you should not need to scroll horizontally back and forth to read each line just because you have a smaller screen.) - Incremental rendering - the document could be rendered as t…

> CSS has a pretty simple and elegant core.

Where can I read about this - has someone written "CSS: the good parts", for example?

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#72

Post by ath92 »

strenholme wrote: post #55
nness wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use a ?

For layout?? Burn the heretic! [1] The real reason we don’t use tables for layout (and only for the occasional tabular data) is because a table layout doesn’t work really well on the screen of an iPhone or Android phone, especially when they are vertically aligned. So, the workaround is to use media selectors: Desktops, laptops, and tablets get a table layout; phones get a simpler one-column layout. I believe grid an…

I think the don't-use-tables argument is from way before mobile devices were something web developers cared about. I recall it as being mostly about semantics, i.e. tables should only be used for tabular data, not setting up the layout of your entire page.

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#73

Post by cutler »

strenholme wrote: post #55
nness wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use a ?

For layout?? Burn the heretic! [1] The real reason we don’t use tables for layout (and only for the occasional tabular data) is because a table layout doesn’t work really well on the screen of an iPhone or Android phone, especially when they are vertically aligned. So, the workaround is to use media selectors: Desktops, laptops, and tablets get a table layout; phones get a simpler one-column layout. I believe grid an…

The Jeffrey Zeldman era of CSS.

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#74

Post by goto11 »

strenholme wrote: post #57
randomsearch wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't fully formed in my mind yet so go easy: Intuition is linked to elegance, an elegantly designed language is intuitive. An elegant language is one that starts with a few core principles and from that derives the rest of the language. Lisp is an example of a programming language that does this beautifully well. Usually (always?) such core principles themselves are taken from mathematics. After all, maths is h…

CSS was never meant to be used for applications. What happened was this: Once upon a time, there was only HTML. It could only make simple text pages. Then the internet revolution of the 1990s happened, and everyone wanted to put make their webpage look like a glossy pamphlet. So along came extra HTML tags, and the widespread abuse of and other tags added to HTML to make web pages look like glossy pamphlets. At the sa…

Yes and no. The "flex" display model was developed by Mozilla all the way back when they crated XUL for defining GUI's.

So this part of the spec was specifically developed for GUI's rather than documents.

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#75

Post by cutler »

CSS is an utter timesink. If I could only recover the time I've wasted fiddling with CSS layouts over the years. If Dart for web makes it we'll finally have an alternative. Thankfully there's now SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose for mobile.

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#76

Post by goto11 »

strenholme wrote: post #55
nness wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use a ?

For layout?? Burn the heretic! [1] The real reason we don’t use tables for layout (and only for the occasional tabular data) is because a table layout doesn’t work really well on the screen of an iPhone or Android phone, especially when they are vertically aligned. So, the workaround is to use media selectors: Desktops, laptops, and tablets get a table layout; phones get a simpler one-column layout. I believe grid an…

I have never seen anyone arguing was not OK for tabular data.

I thought this was a myth on level of teenagers eating tide pods.

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#77

Post by goto11 »

randomsearch wrote: post #71
goto11 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more a failure of the tutorials than of CSS itself though. CSS has a pretty simple and elegant core. You just have to understand the problems it was designed to solve. - Readable documents at any screen dimensions or resolution (i.e. you should not need to scroll horizontally back and forth to read each line just because you have a smaller screen.) - Incremental rendering - the document could be rendered as t…

> CSS has a pretty simple and elegant core. Where can I read about this - has someone written "CSS: the good parts", for example?

Dunno if this exists. Maybe I should write one?

The CSS 2 spec was actually a good introduction to the fundamentals, but it is 20 years out of data now, and the new modular specs does not works well as a tutorial.

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#78

Post by eecks »

CSS sucks and I don't think I'll ever be convinced otherwise.. it's just a mess of tricks you have to remember. The people that do spend time memorizing the tricks turn around and say "hey! look! it's awesome" but that doesn't convince me.

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#79

Post by ivanche »

goto11 wrote: post #67
randomsearch wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't fully formed in my mind yet so go easy: Intuition is linked to elegance, an elegantly designed language is intuitive. An elegant language is one that starts with a few core principles and from that derives the rest of the language. Lisp is an example of a programming language that does this beautifully well. Usually (always?) such core principles themselves are taken from mathematics. After all, maths is h…

This is more a failure of the tutorials than of CSS itself though. CSS has a pretty simple and elegant core. You just have to understand the problems it was designed to solve. - Readable documents at any screen dimensions or resolution (i.e. you should not need to scroll horizontally back and forth to read each line just because you have a smaller screen.) - Incremental rendering - the document could be rendered as t…

I'm not convinced. Literally none of these 3 bullet points are problems with plain HTML since at least 1993 or so - it's responsive by default, incremental by default and user agents are free to zoom in or out at will by default.

Re: Hell Yes CSS

#80

Post by sanderdlm »

randomsearch wrote: post #71
goto11 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more a failure of the tutorials than of CSS itself though. CSS has a pretty simple and elegant core. You just have to understand the problems it was designed to solve. - Readable documents at any screen dimensions or resolution (i.e. you should not need to scroll horizontally back and forth to read each line just because you have a smaller screen.) - Incremental rendering - the document could be rendered as t…

> CSS has a pretty simple and elegant core. Where can I read about this - has someone written "CSS: the good parts", for example?

I like this page: https://www.taniarascia.com/overview-of-css-concepts/
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