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The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

josprague.com

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Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#111

Post by TimTheTinker »

yosito wrote: post #93
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.

I think a collection of basic utility classes (w-100, m-2-t) and layout components (, etc.) are equivalent ideas, and they are nice for quickly setting up a one-off layout that's very readable. But Tailwind turns this practical idea into a religion that locks projects in to using it and harms readability.

Human readability is a very useful proxy for good modularity and separation of concerns (and modularity increases scalability and reusability). Since LLMs take the whole thing in at once, they are terrible at module boundaries. (They also suck at theory of mind, and their comments reflect it, but I digress.)

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#112

Post by nixon_why69 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #110
nixon_why69 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reading is about learning interesting new ideas, enjoying a narrative. The suffering of the author is beside the point. I can sympathize with the notion that AI writing currently sucks, but not that it's automatically invalid or deserving of mockery. Maybe one day we'll have far better models. Maybe they'll do a good job without inserting any load-bearing vocabulary. Asking for the prompts is fine, but might not be s…

It's not about how good or bad the AI writing is. It's about the human interaction, if someone outsourced their thinking to AI then they are bullshitting me and I will rate their thoughts appropriately at the human level.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#113

Post by cyberax »

yosito wrote: post #105
cyberax wrote: post #21

Oh yeah. The fucking CSS Zen Garden. It started the trend that led to utter degradation of any usability in modern web interfaces. The idea was to make HTML decoupled from presentation, but the feeble CSS of that time could not express any real layouts. So very quickly web designers started to just hard-code pixel widths into the CSS, removing any dynamic sizing. For example, on this very page: https://csszengarden.c…

Your frustrations with the state of CSS 2.0 at the time were quite common, and part of what CSS Zen Garden aimed to inspire people to transcend. Now, CSS has evolved to the point where none of these hacks are necessary. You can now write pure, semantic HTML, and pure CSS, and implement full-fidelity designs that work across all modern browsers. That was the whole dream of the CSS Zen Garden, which wasn't fully realiz…

That's the issue. The CSS pushers did not have any ways of solving the CSS issues.

All that "inspiration" resulted in a loss of scalable interfaces and a switch to hard-coded element dimensions. And this persisted for a LONG time because Web UI designers are, in general, bad and were fine with flashy UI that is finger-breakingly bad.

Heck, it's _still_ a problem because people are by now completely oblivious to that. The art of automatic UI layout has been lost completely.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#114

Post by matheusmoreira »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #112
matheusmoreira wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading is about learning interesting new ideas, enjoying a narrative. The suffering of the author is beside the point. I can sympathize with the notion that AI writing currently sucks, but not that it's automatically invalid or deserving of mockery. Maybe one day we'll have far better models. Maybe they'll do a good job without inserting any load-bearing vocabulary. Asking for the prompts is fine, but might not be s…

It's not about how good or bad the AI writing is. It's about the human interaction, if someone outsourced their thinking to AI then they are bullshitting me and I will rate their thoughts appropriately at the human level.

You can value human authorship without automatically ridiculing anyone using AI.

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#115

Post by pasteleft »

arttaboi wrote: post #80
bpbp-mango wrote: post #59

> There’s one honest footnote. nails on a chalkboard. when will agents stop writing like this

I can't wait for AI watermark checks to be widely available to stop such guessworks and the resulting ridicule. I'm not saying you're wrong, your guess could be.

Clearly it will make this even worse. Soon every HN posts will have some comments like "86% AI. Skip it."

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#116

Post by fragmede »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #96
matheusmoreira wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If someone's already burned the trees down to generate it once, why would you want to burn more trees, just so you can do it yourself? Do you hate the Earth or something?

Re: The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

#117

Post by nonethewiser »

ForHackernews wrote: post #35
nonethewiser wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also dont think you can cleanly separate HTML and style. Technically you can separate them but doing so in practice just handicaps your design and ability to express things in HTML and CSS (Zen Garden prohibiting css 3+ in most cases). People have this idea that they should be decoupled. You can do that if you really contort them. Naturally, they are coupled. The structure of HTML puts constraints on the style. You…

The dream was that you could separate content from presentation and content could be adapted and reinterpreted by anyone using whatever tools they choose: User Agents that actually respected the users' vision, not the publishers'.

>The dream was that you could separate content from presentation and content

Yeah. And you cant effectively do that.

Even this project proves it. You have to know which CSS features never to use. You know, like CSS3, which started in 1998.

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