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CSS Grid Lanes

webkit.org

131–140 of 237 posts

Re: CSS Grid Lanes

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this looks great too. Finally replicating the efficiency of newspaper layouts. No enforced symmetry, just content in an optimal space. I want.

It looks pretty, but fails at basic usability. After reading the top-left block of text titled "Optimizing Webkit & Safari for Spedometer 3.0", what the fuck am I supposed to read next? Am I meant to go recursively column by column, or try to scrutinize pixels to determine which of the blocks are further up than the others, skipping haphazardly left and right across the page? A visual aid: https://imgur.com/a/0wHMmBG…

> what the fuck am I supposed to read next?

What a weird comment. You read whatever you want next, ever read a newspaper? You scan it all and pick the article you are interested in, then read that. I don't understand these comments, they work perfectly well in real life (and fixed size is arbitrary, I can make a super wide or super long newspaper too, the axis size does not affect this sort of layout, see infinite scroll for example, as there is only a fixed amount of content on the screen at any given time).

Re: CSS Grid Lanes

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there was a years long debate that effectively ended with: “We held a vote that you weren’t aware of and decided that masonry was out. If you cared, you should have participated in the vote that you were not aware was happening. It’s too late to change it.” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yikbSQ6tvlE

> We held a vote that you weren’t aware of and decided that masonry was out. If you cared, you should have participated in the vote that you were not aware was happening. It’s too late to change it. I think that’s an exceptionally uncharitable description of what happened. This is a decision the WebKit team has been repeatedly publicly asking people to participate in for over 18 months. > Help us invent CSS Grid Leve…

The debates went on for years and following it closely became a poor use of time. Even the subgrid conversation seemed completely stalled. I think a lot of people tuned out long before any vote was discussed. I did.

Re: CSS Grid Lanes

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a bit of a trend with Safari. Around big releases Apple will announce how Safari is the best at X, but other times of the year it gets a lot of flack. I assume this is due to Safari’s more traditional release schedule vs other browsers continuously shipping feature updates.

Cool stuff they're working on tends to take a very long time to reach customers' hands compared to other browsers. Just compare the "stable" and "experimental" graphs on wpt.fyi for Safari. I can't think of a single good reason why they don't adopt an "evergreen" 4/6-week update model except Not Invented Here syndrome or "it's not Apple-like, we prefer the OS team (and therefore Marketing) dictating our release sched…

> I can't think of a single good reason why they don't adopt an "evergreen" 4/6-week update model except Not Invented Here syndrome or "it's not Apple-like, we prefer the OS team (and therefore Marketing) dictating our release schedule, users be damned".

There's a new version of Safari Technology Preview [1] for macOS every two weeks.

There's a new version of Safari released every September for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. This has been the schedule for several years. Since Safari 26 shipped on September 15, 2025, there have been two updates for these platforms:

Safari 26.1 on November 3rd and 26.2 on December 12th.

The Safari team shipped 7 releases this year, averaging 7½ weeks between releases; not a significant difference from 4–6 weeks. Each major release of Safari for macOS runs on the current macOS version (Tahoe) and the two preceding ones—Sequoia and Sonoma.

BTW, there were 9 Safari releases in 2024, averaging 5.8 weeks apart.

It's not the first time Safari shipped a significant new feature before other browsers; :has(), Display P3 color support, JPEG-XL come to mind. At the end of the day, there's no NIH or Marketing team dictating the release schedule.

[1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/

Re: CSS Grid Lanes

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks pretty, but fails at basic usability. After reading the top-left block of text titled "Optimizing Webkit & Safari for Spedometer 3.0", what the fuck am I supposed to read next? Am I meant to go recursively column by column, or try to scrutinize pixels to determine which of the blocks are further up than the others, skipping haphazardly left and right across the page? A visual aid: https://imgur.com/a/0wHMmBG…

> what the fuck am I supposed to read next? What a weird comment. You read whatever you want next, ever read a newspaper? You scan it all and pick the article you are interested in, then read that. I don't understand these comments, they work perfectly well in real life (and fixed size is arbitrary, I can make a super wide or super long newspaper too, the axis size does not affect this sort of layout, see infinite sc…

> You scan it all and pick the article you are interested in

Okay. What order am I supposed to scan in so I don't lose my place and accidentally skip a block? Scanning column by column gets me cut off partial boxes that I'll have to remember to check again later, while scanning side to side forces me to keep track of each individual block I've already looked at, as opposed to a single pointer to "this is how far I've scanned". Alternatively, I can scan roughly left to right, top to bottom and just live with missing some blocks. That's not ideal either, because hopefully if you didn't think I'd like to look at all of them you wouldn't have included them on the page.

You're right that you can make a newspaper that's really inconvenient to read, but you wouldn't, because the failure case you'd end up with is CSS Grid Lanes.

Re: CSS Grid Lanes

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what the fuck am I supposed to read next? What a weird comment. You read whatever you want next, ever read a newspaper? You scan it all and pick the article you are interested in, then read that. I don't understand these comments, they work perfectly well in real life (and fixed size is arbitrary, I can make a super wide or super long newspaper too, the axis size does not affect this sort of layout, see infinite sc…

> You scan it all and pick the article you are interested in Okay. What order am I supposed to scan in so I don't lose my place and accidentally skip a block? Scanning column by column gets me cut off partial boxes that I'll have to remember to check again later, while scanning side to side forces me to keep track of each individual block I've already looked at, as opposed to a single pointer to "this is how far I've…

This is so funny that I'm not even sure what to say. You can ask your exact questions about a newspaper but somehow 99% of people manage to read them just fine. I think it's just a you problem that you are looking for an exact algorithm on how to scan a page with multiple sizes of content; in reality, people just look over it all and keep track of what they have or haven't looked at all in their heads.

Re: CSS Grid Lanes

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We held a vote that you weren’t aware of and decided that masonry was out. If you cared, you should have participated in the vote that you were not aware was happening. It’s too late to change it. I think that’s an exceptionally uncharitable description of what happened. This is a decision the WebKit team has been repeatedly publicly asking people to participate in for over 18 months. > Help us invent CSS Grid Leve…

The debates went on for years and following it closely became a poor use of time. Even the subgrid conversation seemed completely stalled. I think a lot of people tuned out long before any vote was discussed. I did.

But if you were the one who tuned out, then isn’t it uncharitable to describe it as their failing to make you aware of the vote? Isn’t it on you to stay in the loop?

Surely they can’t start just pinging everyone who might have cared at some point during the time to get involved.

Re: CSS Grid Lanes

#140
post #133

What’s the best resource for getting a handle on all modern CSS for someone who hasn’t paid attention since flex box

I like Josh W Comeau's content, he has a lot of free articles, but his paid CSS course goes through step by step why CSS is the way that it is, worked great for me for understanding it all. My work paid for it though, that's why it's priced so high, but I'm sure he has discounts for individuals.
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