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Languages Which Almost Became CSS

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Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#41

Post by zackbloom »

justinator wrote: post #34
Animats wrote: post #27

Layout should have been constraint-oriented, not procedural. You should be able to express "Bottom of this box is adjacent to top of that box", and such. All those constraints go into a constraint engine, and a layout is generated. This is something a WYSIWYG editor can generate. To get a sense of how this could work, try sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor (there's a free 30 day demo) You can specify that a point must…

> The people who designed HTML5 and CSS thought procedurally, not geometrically. It shows. The problem the article points out is that they wanted styling to happen, before the entire document is downloaded. Obv. you can't say, "hey, this box should be pinned to the bottom of the footer" if the HTML for the footer isn't yet existing in the stream that's downloaded. I think enough people fume when they see the Flash of…

You are free to implement anything you like in JavaScript. There are several implementations of this type of constraint layout, but none have ever really taken off.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#43

Post by Millennium »

frik wrote: post #26

> Contrary to popular perception, Mosaic was not the first graphical browser. It was predated by ViolaWWW Neither was ViolaWWW the first grahical browser. In fact the very first browser by Sir Tim Berners-Lee was already a graphical browser (even with WYSIWYG edit mode later known from Frontpage/Dreamweaver) - made possible by thr advanced NeXTSTEP operating system and its window builder IDE (nowadays known as OSX/ma…

When people talk about "graphical Web browsers" in a historical context, they're not just talking about browsers that run in a GUI. The term specifically refers to browsers that can display graphics and text in the same window. The earliest versions of WorldWideWeb (Tim Berners-Lee's original browser) couldn't do this. It used NSText (NeXTStep's native text-display object) for displaying pages, and at the time NSText didn't support inline images, so WorldWideWeb relegated images to separate windows at the time. It did eventually become a graphical browser in this regard, once NSText had the necessary inline image support, but ViolaWWW beat it to the punch.

You don't hear much about graphical browsers anymore, not because they died out but because they became such an overwhelming majority that it no longer made much sense to make any distinction. But a few non-graphical browsers are still in development; Lynx is probably the most famous of them.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#44

Post by ldng »

Grue3 wrote: post #11

DSSSL looks amazing. Truly a shame it didn't catch on. Maybe we'd have a client-side Lisp instead of Javascript too.

A DSSSL implementation on desktop still exists : openjade [1]. Could probably be ported successfully to JS today. Heck, someone could try to compile it with Emscripten.

[1] http://openjade.sourceforge.net/

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#45

Post by Zelphyr »

Millennium wrote: post #43
frik wrote: post #26

> Contrary to popular perception, Mosaic was not the first graphical browser. It was predated by ViolaWWW Neither was ViolaWWW the first grahical browser. In fact the very first browser by Sir Tim Berners-Lee was already a graphical browser (even with WYSIWYG edit mode later known from Frontpage/Dreamweaver) - made possible by thr advanced NeXTSTEP operating system and its window builder IDE (nowadays known as OSX/ma…

When people talk about "graphical Web browsers" in a historical context, they're not just talking about browsers that run in a GUI. The term specifically refers to browsers that can display graphics and text in the same window. The earliest versions of WorldWideWeb (Tim Berners-Lee's original browser) couldn't do this. It used NSText (NeXTStep's native text-display object) for displaying pages, and at the time NSText…

Is the original source code that Tim Berners-Lee wrote available anywhere? I would think it would be an interesting read.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#46

Post by smitherfield »

sdegutis wrote: post #40
smitherfield wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, slower and then faster. Virtual selectors mean that CSS is now also Turing-complete (in a horrible, horrible way). And DSSSL would've been able to handle much or maybe even all of what's currently handled by Javascript.

> And DSSSL would've been able to handle much or maybe even all of what's currently handled by Javascript. I severely doubt that. JavaScript can inspect attributes of anything on the entire page, run remote HTTP queries and inspect their attributes, and make styling decisions based on those, on the fly, and in response to user GUI events. Granted, I'd probably be really okay with these features no longer existing. Ju…

I should've been more clear — DSSSL might've been able, possibly in conjunction with later extensions (just as XJAX was not originally part of Javascript), to provide a similar end-user experience in many cases as CSS+Javascript currently does, albeit with very different semantics for the developer.

Not sure it would be better (it probably erred on the side of too much mixing of program logic and styling rather than too little), but it would certainly be different.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#47

Post by abecedarius »

justinator wrote: post #34
Animats wrote: post #27

Layout should have been constraint-oriented, not procedural. You should be able to express "Bottom of this box is adjacent to top of that box", and such. All those constraints go into a constraint engine, and a layout is generated. This is something a WYSIWYG editor can generate. To get a sense of how this could work, try sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor (there's a free 30 day demo) You can specify that a point must…

> The people who designed HTML5 and CSS thought procedurally, not geometrically. It shows. The problem the article points out is that they wanted styling to happen, before the entire document is downloaded. Obv. you can't say, "hey, this box should be pinned to the bottom of the footer" if the HTML for the footer isn't yet existing in the stream that's downloaded. I think enough people fume when they see the Flash of…

Surely you can say that -- that constraints are declarative means that resolving them doesn't have to happen in a particular order. The solver could stash away the constraint involving an element that doesn't exist yet, until it does.

If this sometimes moves elements that are already displayed, that'd be a problem. Isn't it a problem we're seeing anyway?

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#48

Post by agumonkey »

mordocai wrote: post #36
marcosdumay wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that metaprogramming does not scale to teams. Or maybe it's just the historical artifact that everybody claims to be, and if the PDP-10 supported a lisp environment, things would be different. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on metaprogramming not scaling.

Ruby and Clojure are doing decently (though obviously not as popular as say C and Java) and have pretty advanced metaprogramming. For that matter C++ templates are metaprogramming from what I understand, and C macros are a really really primitive form of metaprogramming. Java also has reflection which is metaprogramming-ish. I don't think the problem was metaprogramming.

Not the same level of metaprogramming. Ruby Python try but it's less idiomatic or batshit crazy. C macros are glorified sed scripts, you're at the byte buffer level; it's cute but not good either. To me lisps sit at a nice middle ground where metalevels are as close as possible while still being usable. That's my take based on what people said in the 60s, after all sexps weren't supposed to be used.

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#49

Post by zackbloom »

Zelphyr wrote: post #45
Millennium wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people talk about "graphical Web browsers" in a historical context, they're not just talking about browsers that run in a GUI. The term specifically refers to browsers that can display graphics and text in the same window. The earliest versions of WorldWideWeb (Tim Berners-Lee's original browser) couldn't do this. It used NSText (NeXTStep's native text-display object) for displaying pages, and at the time NSText…

Is the original source code that Tim Berners-Lee wrote available anywhere? I would think it would be an interesting read.

Yep! http://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeXT...

Interestingly, some of the code "still resides on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT Computer in the CERN museum and has not been recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact."

Re: Languages Which Almost Became CSS

#50

Post by brett40324 »

Zelphyr wrote: post #45
Millennium wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people talk about "graphical Web browsers" in a historical context, they're not just talking about browsers that run in a GUI. The term specifically refers to browsers that can display graphics and text in the same window. The earliest versions of WorldWideWeb (Tim Berners-Lee's original browser) couldn't do this. It used NSText (NeXTStep's native text-display object) for displaying pages, and at the time NSText…

Is the original source code that Tim Berners-Lee wrote available anywhere? I would think it would be an interesting read.

Thanks! That IS great to check out. It took him many rounds of proposals at CERN to finally be able to realize his ideas. The details of it all is an epic read.
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