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The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

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Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#91

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Latty wrote: post #36
throwitaway222 wrote: post #34

CSS Zen Garden in the era of agentic software development.... I would say we're at a point where if the entire site was developed in tables or CSS or a Rust based engine emitting wasm positioned elements - no one would care anymore. Just give me a view and let me operate on things. We're going to have our "LCARS" moment soon. Where no one really needs to create a UI - the system creates one for you at time of use - b…

People say stuff like this and just... do you never think about accessibility? Have you never experienced stuff changing the UI under your feet and how incredibly annoying and flow-breaking it is? It reminds me of people wanting Hollywood UIs that would obviously suck to actually use. Just completely ignoring the reality of using what you are suggesting.

A generative AI UI would be far better at accessibility than various fixed human attempts, because every user would be able to customise it to suit their own needs from their own set of customisation preferences.

People still aren't understanding that the mid-game of AI is the end of fixed cultural objects.

Everything becomes potentially customisable by the user, including the affordances, the UI, and the content algorithms.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#93

Post by yosito »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #29

This is really great work, but I think a lot of folks on HN don't look kindly on the CSS Zen Garden or that era of CSS. They think the markup/stylesheet separation of concerns was a terrible idea, an idea that Tailwind exists to fix. (I think they're wrong, that separation of concerns is good, Tailwind is a hack, and get off my lawn while you're at it.) The point is - now the modern vanilla web platform really can su…

I agree completely. Personally, Tailwind never really resonated with me, though I've used it several times, and we did even briefly consider it for this project. I always felt that it was an approach created by people who never understood the paradigm of CSS, and didn't want to. Since my career started with CSS, I've always been more of a purist.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#94

Post by yosito »

chrismorgan wrote: post #28

I see no connection whatsoever with the CSS Zen Garden dream. CSS Zen Garden was about applying radically different styles to the same markup. This is about newer CSS features like Custom Properties, Flex and Grid making maintenance of a single stylesheet for a single completely typical website.

This is a reasonable reaction. Thank you for pointing that out. I've updated the post with some thoughts on this. Basically, think the radically different styles part of the CSS Zen Garden was only how the dream was shown, but it wasn't the substance of the dream itself. The substance of the dream was to show the power of CSS, and what was possible with separation of concerns and browser support. And that's what I think we showed with what we build for Firefox.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#95

Post by yosito »

deburo wrote: post #15

The current firefox.com is incredibly simple, though. It's also pretty tablet/phone centric (everything is so large on Desktop).

Personally, I love the current Firefox.com design and see the simplicity as a feature. And it's designed to be responsive to any screen size. A design like this would have been incredibly challenging to build with CSS 2.0 in 2008. That's the point of this post. But if you find the design boring, just like the CSS Zen Garden, you can design your own user stylesheet to re-style the whole site, hundreds of pages in dozens of languages, into any design you want, with one stylesheet, because the styles are cleanly separated from the markup. Have fun!

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#96

Post by nixon_why69 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #90
nixon_why69 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little metaphysical for my taste. If its the same bytes of text, provenance is destroyed anyways, so who knows if the tree fell in the forest. "Substantially" to me would mean not your ideas and not your writing. I'm sure there are borderline cases that are hard to decide but a rule of thumb for me would be if it takes more time to read than it took the "author" to write.

The issue is metaphysical. If AI can produce the exact same output a human would, does it matter who made it? It's possible for the ideas to come from the author while the writing is outsourced to someone else. Ghostwriting is an established practice. Effort involved in writing sounds a lot like the "sweat of of the brow" doctrine, which is rejected even by copyright monopolists.

It's about effort into thinking. If no effort went into either thinking or writing, then I'll plead guilty to sweat of the brow doctrine. Again, just send me the prompt and I'll feed it to AI myself.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#97

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #85
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now there is a lot of prejudice against AI users, and detection will only encourage that. That’s exactly how it should be. If you serve me up AI-generated rubbish that I’m then supposed to sift through, you’ve earned the ridicule of the whole world.

> AI-generated rubbish Implies you'd accept it if it wasn't rubbish. Seriously doubt your filter is based on quality. > you’ve earned the ridicule of the whole world As if human writing immunizes you from that. Published an article about garbage collection and had people complain about my human voice. One went so far as to suggest I had mental issues. I received praise too but some things you just never forget. Best…

I’ve never said that you don’t deserve to be ridiculed when you write human rubbish, but I haven’t claimed the opposite either. However, I do believe that you definitely and without exception deserve to be ridiculed when you produce AI-generated rubbish.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#98

Post by yosito »

vehemenz wrote: post #16

The CSS Zen Garden worked because everyone was using a single markup file. In real life, it doesn't really work. Instead of thinking of separation of concerns as a religious principle, think about what benefits it actually yields in the case of HTML. When the markup is completely separated from its styling, this means that the CSS rules need a way to be mapped onto the DOM. This involves specific elements, organized…

> The CSS Zen Garden worked because everyone was using a single markup file.

CSS Zen Garden was a proof of concept built around a single markup file. But if you extend that concept to hundreds of dynamic pages and a well built CSS design system, that's where the real power of CSS shows.

> In real life, it doesn't really work.

In real life it works incredibly well, which is what CSS Zen Garden originally showed, and what we've proven by applying these concepts to Firefox.

> If anything is out of place in the markup, the properties may not apply as intended. Similarly, if the CSS doesn't account for DOM structures, then you need modify rules or add new ones.

When stylesheets are written with an understanding of the Cascade and specificity, this isn't the case at all.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#99

Post by yosito »

bastawhiz wrote: post #68
hirako2000 wrote: post #26

The postprocessor remains to fix some performance issue with @import? How does inlining imports fixes it? When I loaded the page, the font flickered. Perhaps the article isn't about font import, those better be in html headers or simply stick to system fonts.

CSS imports create a dependency tree of stylesheets. You can't render anything until all of the styles are loaded and parsed. Imports create a blocking serial dependency.

Yes, not only this, but in my experience, several older browsers actually crash or freeze with too many @import statements in the CSS. While those browsers weren't necessarily a priority to support with modern styles, they styles they recieved still needed to be minimally accessible, so crashing the browser was a deal breaker.
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