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Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

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Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#101

Post by btbuildem »

alpaca128 wrote: post #52
pavlov wrote: post #22

If the designers of Unix had seen the light of CSS, they wouldn’t have bothered with shells and file descriptors and C and Awk and all that composable flotsam. They’d just created a single program, call it the “Central Software System”, and defined thousands of properties that let you control its state machine to produce the output you need. Presto! The perfect computer. If for some reason someone needs a new kind of…

Did the designers of Unix also have to ensure compatibility with billions of devices connected worldwide running different software stacks? Also as mentioned in the linked article the masonry layout is already possible with JS, no decades-long committee process needed. It's just about standardizing something frequently used.

The point GP is making is that they didn't have to, because the architecture made it infinitely configurable while remaining coherent.

Billions of connected devices worldwide do indeed run on *nix with a mad variety stacked on top.

Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#102

Post by wizzwizz4 »

baryphonic wrote: post #40
zarzavat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is the final layout system. No declarative language can ever handle every use case. Fortunately I rarely need to resort to JS since grid came out. I’m not sure a constraint based system would do much good as it would sit awkwardly in the middle of grid and JS.

> No declarative language can ever handle every use case. Prolog would beg to differ.

Prolog has well-defined execution order with side-effects. It's an imperative language masquerading as a declarative one.

Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#103

Post by dada78641 »

pavlov wrote: post #60
afavour wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost - almost! - as if the designers of Unix and of CSS work in completely different scenarios and with completely different constraints! Almost!

And with this convenient domain excuse, CSS has managed to become a system that’s not a fit for any domain. It’s incomprehensible to visual designers, incomprehensible to programmers, and incomprehensible to document authors. On the upside, it provides a massive moat of sunk cost and implicit implementation dependency around Chromium, so at least there’s that.

While I agree that CSS is sometimes difficult and obtuse, and getting things working in it is more of an art than a science, it's actually shockingly easy to get basic layouts working in it these days even as a total beginner. CSS is very powerful and you can learn the basics very quickly.

It's also worth keeping in mind that CSS is sometimes more complicated than it seems like it should be due to accessibility concerns and flexibility. That's why you can take some HTML produced by some part of your system and use it in completely different contexts with totally different designs, entirely as is, just by adding a few different rules.

I've been doing HTML dev since the late 90s and things were infinitely more difficult back in the old days. CSS might have been simpler, but doing complex things required tons of bizarre hacks that also made your design more frail and less accessible. These days CSS has improved to the point where you can do just about anything, and even very complicated effects can fairly easily be deconstructed just by looking at the devtools and poking around until you get it.

CSS isn't perfect, but all things considered I'm not complaining.

Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#104

Post by snapcaster »

pavlov wrote: post #60
afavour wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost - almost! - as if the designers of Unix and of CSS work in completely different scenarios and with completely different constraints! Almost!

And with this convenient domain excuse, CSS has managed to become a system that’s not a fit for any domain. It’s incomprehensible to visual designers, incomprehensible to programmers, and incomprehensible to document authors. On the upside, it provides a massive moat of sunk cost and implicit implementation dependency around Chromium, so at least there’s that.

Not fit for any domain? It's one of the most widely used "programming languages" in the world. It's clearly fit for many domains I don't know why people have to be so dramatic with their tech opinions

Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#105

Post by jojobas »

pavlov wrote: post #22

If the designers of Unix had seen the light of CSS, they wouldn’t have bothered with shells and file descriptors and C and Awk and all that composable flotsam. They’d just created a single program, call it the “Central Software System”, and defined thousands of properties that let you control its state machine to produce the output you need. Presto! The perfect computer. If for some reason someone needs a new kind of…

Was rather hard to tell if you're joking or not, seeing how every trivial program today wants to have Electron with it.

Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#106

Post by crote »

nkozyra wrote: post #49
pquki4 wrote: post #35

I thought this kind of waterfall layout was cool and trendy a few years ago, but these days very few websites are doing it?

For awhile it was just described as "Pinterest style." It has some use cases but for the most part it's literally a wall of unstructed information. Difficult to parse and build any mental hierarchy. It's also ... incredibly easy to do with existing css.

Yeah, it's quite weird to see such an obscure feature being proposed as a CSS standard. The demos just aren't convincing? Sure, I get the Pinterest application, but the other ones seem like a solution in search of a problem.

In the megamenu demo the multicolumn layout is pretty much indistinguishable from masonry. The only thing wrong with it is that it allows column breaks in the middle of content. That doesn't need masonry to fix it.

In the newspaper demo the multicolumn layout is actually better, because that's how newspapers work. The masonry demo becomes an unreadable mess.

The museum demo almost feels intentionally mis-designed. The CSS Grid 1 layout obviously has issues, but it could've easily been solved by pulling the nav bar out of the gallery, and using a multicolumn layout for the gallery instead.

So that leaves the Pinterest-style photo gallery. Sure, it's objectively better if you want to achieve this kind of style, but it's an outdated design with horrible UX. Why is it special enough that we need explicit support for it in the standard?

Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#107

Post by gherkinnn »

pavlov wrote: post #60
afavour wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost - almost! - as if the designers of Unix and of CSS work in completely different scenarios and with completely different constraints! Almost!

And with this convenient domain excuse, CSS has managed to become a system that’s not a fit for any domain. It’s incomprehensible to visual designers, incomprehensible to programmers, and incomprehensible to document authors. On the upside, it provides a massive moat of sunk cost and implicit implementation dependency around Chromium, so at least there’s that.

Nonsense. CSS works. It has its quirks, but what doesn't?

What I do see here, is one of many cases of "I don't understand it therefore it is dumb because it can't be my fault".

Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#108

Post by bmacho »

pavlov wrote: post #60
afavour wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost - almost! - as if the designers of Unix and of CSS work in completely different scenarios and with completely different constraints! Almost!

And with this convenient domain excuse, CSS has managed to become a system that’s not a fit for any domain. It’s incomprehensible to visual designers, incomprehensible to programmers, and incomprehensible to document authors. On the upside, it provides a massive moat of sunk cost and implicit implementation dependency around Chromium, so at least there’s that.

But your favorite 20% of CSS (just like in the old days + some of the new features) fits nicely for web design.

Re: Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout

#109

Post by pavlov »

miunau wrote: post #82
pavlov wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with this convenient domain excuse, CSS has managed to become a system that’s not a fit for any domain. It’s incomprehensible to visual designers, incomprehensible to programmers, and incomprehensible to document authors. On the upside, it provides a massive moat of sunk cost and implicit implementation dependency around Chromium, so at least there’s that.

Maybe you need better glasses. This proposal is coming from the Webkit team, ie. Apple. CSS is plenty comprehensible and using it gets better with every browser release as they are focused around yearly interoperability efforts.

AFAICT, practically nobody picks WebKit over Blink/Chromium for new projects.

The reasons why Apple still maintains their own browser engine have to do with corporate prestige and expensive insurance policy. They can afford it because Apple is literally the world’s richest corporation.

Nobody else does anymore. Even Microsoft gave up on their own browser engine despite having 97% market share two decades ago. And Mozilla is bankrolled by Google as their own kind of insurance policy.

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