I really appreciate the mobile version of this article. Clean, lightweight and beautiful.
Why is CSS the way it is?
31–40 of 173 posts
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#32I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…
There's the experimental :has pseudo-class which appears to be doing what you want [1]. Personally, I'm against adding any more complexity to CSS, though; and :has fundamentally changes the locality/algorithmics and complexity of CSS selector matching. I think if the goal of CSS was to bring good-enough styling to the masses, it has utterly failed to so, yet has left a legacy of overcomplicated and badly specified ad…
> a legacy of overcomplicated and badly specified ad-hoc styling rules that don't compose to a reasonable whole
Agreed. For instance instead of creating the flexbox display, it would have been much nicer to version it out into CSS4 with center aligns, vertical aligns, and a few other things fixed rather than continuing to add new concept layers and increasing the complexity.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish everyone in web developemnt stopped only looking at the thing that makes it easier for themselves and start to focus on what's best for the users.
Flash websites were awesome. the player needed work, but for end users there web was a much more interesting and diverse place
Unless you used a screen reader
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#34This is a somewhat superficial history that only briefly touches on origins, and doesn't discuss the fundamental idea behind CSS, from which everything else is, directly or otherwise, a consequence. Two decades ago I was overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last do…
Wow, I'd absolutely love to hear more about this if you've got something to share ...
To win a sizable portion of HNers, it suffices to say that DSSSL was the Scheme-based styling and transformation language of SGML (implemented by Jade/OpenJade). I can only imagine where we'd be now if DSSSL had won over CSS and similar FOSI-like ad-hoc styling languages (or even SGML's own LINK process declarations that however was kindof questioned by James Clark seeing the need for DSSSL). Personally I'm not into Lisp, but I'm very much missing the Lisp community's relentless search for ultimate simplicity, clarity, and expressiveness in the design of CSS.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#35Article revealing origins of CSS should at least mention that one of its (at least initial) primary goals was to set that "entirely different academic yet simple presentation language" in a way it would allow dialogue among at least three agents expressing their visual preferences. This mechanism, cascade - the the "C" in "CSS" - is that mechanism that sets rules how different preferences should be merged together and conflicting resolved in final visual presentation of documents.
Simply said, that what style sheets communicates are mere suggestions for appearance: browser has its "default" style sheet, users can set their own set of rules, author sets their, but user and browser still have control what author can and cannot change.
I see this "origin specificity" as very important fundament that explains a lot about the way CSS emerged and evolved. This bit of information, however "obsolete" it may feel nowadays in age of web applications (but not obsolete standards-wise), is perhaps too obvious to most professionals, yet I see it omitted from learning materials, or dug very deep in them.
(Sorry for repeating myself here at HN, and sorry if I overlooked it in the article, I admit I've just skimmed it searching for this exact piece of information.)
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#36I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…
CSS clicked for me from the very start. It was always fun, I never had problems with it (aside from the browser bugs, of course). Maybe problem others have with it is not because of the nature of the CSS, but because of people ignoring that nature and refusing to learn it and trying to carry over their experience with other technologies to CSS.
You were never asked to implement a simple three column layout in CSS where the center column expands with the screen size? That’s often the first thing people were asked to do in the early days after being asked to replace the old table based layout. CSS grid/flexbox took way too long to arrive.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Give me better composition options with css. I will love it. Until then, it is a toxic relationship. I have to use a preprocessor for that and it increases the time to see feedback from the browser.
Don't get me wrong, of course if you'd ask me whether I could envision something better and more elegant than CSS I would immediately have ideas in the back of my mind — however if you'd tell me I'd be stuck with CSS as it is my response would probably be a neutral shrug. It could be better, but it is okay and the direction things are going (CSS variables, Grids, ...) are not too bad either. People who call it horrib…
Six hours for (someone compared to me) an expert? Hardly a ringing endorsement.
I dread every time I have to touch web or create web stuff and while I loathe JS it’s the CSS I fear.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#38I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…
IIRC the parent selector has big performance implications, so its spec has been postponed for years
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Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#39Ever notice how the phrase "I love how CSS works..." is inevitably followed by "but x or y really sucks, is too complex, is inconsistent..." I can't recall meeting a cheerleader for CSS the way you do for, say, lisp/scheme or forth.
Sure, everything has gaps, and fans are the first to point them out... but CSS fans always have a lot of fuel to bring up in the flaws dept.
It's starting to feel like css is approach emacs/vim level of argument-starting tinder.
Is that because it's so good, or because we are stuck with it?
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#40HSL is fine. More people are familiar with it than with CIE LCH, and familiarity is the most important thing. There may be better color systems, but to paraphrase the saying, there are also better alphabets.