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CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

pchiusano.github.io

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Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#121

Post by calinet6 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #101
baddox wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If HTML was still just hypertext, which is text organized with links to other text, then the separation of data from appearance makes sense. But we happen to use HTML and other web technologies to create complex long-lived applications that are much more than hypertext.

Seems to me that the answer is to provide a real applications development environment. Not to shoehorn ever more crap into browsers. I've called before for splitting Web functionality into several modes. I think it's fairly clearly the way to go, and is actually how development's been headed to a reasonable approximation for the past few years. 1. A reading / discussion oriented platform. The traditional browser, tho…

How are 2-4 not covered by every other applications development platform on desktop or any other platform?

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#122

Post by Raphmedia »

owenversteeg wrote: post #82

Most "problems" with CSS (with the exception of vertical centering and a few others) are caused by the fact that people can't be bothered to learn CSS. It's funny: if a programmer is told to write CSS but doesn't know how, he'll copy-and-paste from Stack Overflow, get a shit result, and say that CSS sucks. If a programmer is told to write Elm but doesn't know how, he'll learn the language, write some decent Elm, and…

That.

I actually learned CSS in a school. My teachers were real front-end developers.

I can honestly say that I never had any problem with CSS and that I never found it to be broken. The only issues that I think of come from trying to fix things for the old IE browsers, which are broken.

CSS itself? Mastered it in 3 months if not less.

Come on, people. You can't give me both "You are paid less because CSS is easy to learn!" and "CSS is so hard! I can't use it! We should create something new to remplace it!".

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#123

Post by tdj »

A layout engine works on a different level of abstraction, putting layout features in CSS will be awkward. CSS is fine for typographic features and selectors, but layout is all about relationships.

Actually, one really impressive engine for web layout engine is Treesaver: https://github.com/Treesaver/treesaver

It's meant to provide primitives that are familiar to people from graphic design working on paginated content, like columns, grids, floating containers. Like Latex, it's also has the least-bad-layout strategy, but here, this runs on the client in Javascript, so that it adapts to the screen size.

I had just stopped working on a startup based on this technology. Operationally, it was proving extremely difficult adding effects that people are taking for granted in InDesign to work in a responsive manner on top of CSS and a 20kLoC Javascript layout engine. It took around a year of development just to get to the level of layout automation sophistication comparable to what a junior layout designer would produce.

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#124

Post by thisone »

notduncansmith wrote: post #68
girvo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some things a designer will throw at you that are very very difficult to achieve in CSS in any regular way (sans non-cross-browser-compatible hacks). But for the most part, CSS isn't too bad.

I've yet to run into those, but then again I am my company's primary designer, as well as implementing whatever I design. Perhaps as a product of that, I don't end up having to code up (m)any ridiculous designs.

I believe that's your answer. When you work with print designers who have moved to web design, but don't know thing 1 about css or html, you get some funky designs.

Really nice designs, but complicated PITAs to actually develop

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#125

Post by err4nt »

yawaramin wrote: post #71
ender7 wrote: post #51

Graphical layout is one of the most underestimated challenges in computer science. Programmers instinctively look at the problem and thing "oh, this is logical, I'll just whip up some basic principles and layout primitives and I'll have this solved in no time!" No, you won't. Designing a layout framework is really, really hard. Designing one that is simultaneously expressive enough to handle all of the crazy corner c…

1. Someone _has_ come up with the One True Layout System. It's just that most people like to pretend TeX doesn't exist or, when they grok the box-and-glue layout model, try to reinvent it from scratch.

does TeX have responsive layout with a variable document width? For the past year my ability to use CSS alone to convert an existing HTML Website and make it work on mobile has been putting food on my table. Could I be using TeX for the same thing?

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#126

Post by pornel »

baddox wrote: post #119
rimantas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, at this point, there is no abstraction gain from > ... > over floating_figure(...) There is no abstraction gain, because you are using a presentational class name. It should not be "floating_figure", "big_red_text" or anything of the kind. What it could probably be is "feynman_diagram" or something simmilar describing what's so special about this particular element, not the looks or placement of it. And then i…

The idea of semantic class names is reasonable, but even that ends up needing to be ridiculously contrived with things like "feynman-diagram-wrapper."

There's proposal for ::outer pseudo-element to eliminate all such wrappers.

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#127

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #53
ender7 wrote: post #51

Graphical layout is one of the most underestimated challenges in computer science. Programmers instinctively look at the problem and thing "oh, this is logical, I'll just whip up some basic principles and layout primitives and I'll have this solved in no time!" No, you won't. Designing a layout framework is really, really hard. Designing one that is simultaneously expressive enough to handle all of the crazy corner c…

I used to work with whacky designers who would always come up with ideas that broke the layout system for whatever toolkit we were using, so I quickly "adapted" by using canvas and doing it all myself. To that end I created Bling: http://bling.codeplex.com/ The idea is that layout in WPF is so ridiculously complicated, yet data binding could be made so ridiculously simple (hey, they are almost constraints!), that it…

Is calc() in modern CSS combined with some variables sufficient?

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#128

Post by dkersten »

owenversteeg wrote: post #82

Most "problems" with CSS (with the exception of vertical centering and a few others) are caused by the fact that people can't be bothered to learn CSS. It's funny: if a programmer is told to write CSS but doesn't know how, he'll copy-and-paste from Stack Overflow, get a shit result, and say that CSS sucks. If a programmer is told to write Elm but doesn't know how, he'll learn the language, write some decent Elm, and…

I've spent ten years learning and using CSS and I still find it very hard to do even seemingly simple layout.

I spent about six months with QML before I was capable of beautiful, rich, animated graphical user interfaces. QML was a much nicer experience and I can get the results I want very quickly with few or no errors. CSS is a struggle every single time.

Is that just me not being bothered to learn CSS? Or could it possibly be that CSS really isn't that good a tool to begin with?

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#129

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

owenversteeg wrote: post #82

Most "problems" with CSS (with the exception of vertical centering and a few others) are caused by the fact that people can't be bothered to learn CSS. It's funny: if a programmer is told to write CSS but doesn't know how, he'll copy-and-paste from Stack Overflow, get a shit result, and say that CSS sucks. If a programmer is told to write Elm but doesn't know how, he'll learn the language, write some decent Elm, and…

I've found CSS no less confusing than Tk layouting, but maybe just because I know CSS layouting pretty well by now.

Re: CSS is unnecessary given a layout language

#130

Post by nawitus »

taternuts wrote: post #11
ChrisGaudreau wrote: post #6

I actually like CSS as it is now, and it's getting better ( cough , flexbox). Am I the only one who finds CSS incredibly hard to master, though? I've been writing CSS for years and I still feel like a newbie sometimes, and feel like I'm just tinkering with random attributes until it looks right.

> I've been writing CSS for years and I still feel like a newbie sometimes, and feel like I'm just tinkering with random attributes until it looks right. This is exactly how I work with CSS too. Not surprisingly, it's my least favorite aspect of web development.

This is how everyone I know works like, myself included.
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