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

webkit.org

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

#61

Post by HeckFeck »

datascienced wrote: post #37
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…

Is this a sysvinit vs systemd rant?

   $ /etc/init.d/initwar start
   Starting initwar (via systemd)
Sad sysadmin noises

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

#62

Post by chrismorgan »

sebstefan wrote: post #25
chrismorgan wrote: post #15

I strongly dislike the megamenu demo https://webkit.org/demos/grid3/megamenu/ >, and feel masonry is completely inappropriate there. It makes a complete mess of flow direction, badly breaking expectations. The reading order you’d expect : https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2024-04-23-masonry-megamenu-2.... . What the demo actually gives you: https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2024-04-23-masonry-megamenu-1.... . This affects co…

That's just a random demo. It's not particularly relevant for the concept they're trying to gather feedback on

The demos should be motivating the feature. A bad demo is destructive to that effort. This is a very bad demo.

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

#63

Post by thejohnconway »

codingclaws wrote: post #57

I built a masonry layout with only CSS and HTML 10 years ago. The site is actually still live. A scripting language is used to generate the HTML and CSS based on the dimensions of the images. But the masonry runs left to right not top to bottom.

How does that differ from just setting the images to be inline-blocks? Was it justified?

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

#64

Post by afavour »

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.

I’m a web programmer and I find it comprehensible. Sure there are times I need to go to the docs but vast majority of the time I can work with it just fine. I’d agree that it probably is incomprehensible to many visual designers but unfortunately so is code in general. CSS is complex, especially these days, but I feel like those who don’t work with the web every day simply don’t get to experience it often enough to know that it does make sense within its domain.

But sure, if you want, CSS is a conspiracy theory to ensure the dominance of Google.

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

#65

Post by kevincox »

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.

It's fine, just run ./configure before compiling.

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

#66

Post by wongarsu »

mattbessey wrote: post #17

> This layout creates uniformly-sized columns, without any rows I find it amusing that they've decided to refer to this as masonry layout. If you actually built a wall like this (as opposed to uniformly-sized rows , without any columns ) it would be a structural engineering disaster.

Maybe there should be a grid-template-masonry-direction? Just quickly surveying a couple of sites, "masonry" and "horizontal masonry" seem to be about equally common.

On the other hand horizontal masonry is constructed very differently: Flickr fits thumbnails into a row until it reaches some predefined total length, then scales everything down slightly so the total row width matches exactly (resulting in rows of different height). Deviantart does something similar, but shuffles the images for better fit so that the different row heights are barely perceptible.

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

#67

Post by rezonant »

georgesimon wrote: post #54
mattbessey wrote: post #17

> This layout creates uniformly-sized columns, without any rows I find it amusing that they've decided to refer to this as masonry layout. If you actually built a wall like this (as opposed to uniformly-sized rows , without any columns ) it would be a structural engineering disaster.

I think, in structural engineering terms, it refers to old natural stone wall [0] construction methods. Some bridges around me are made like this, and they're over a thousand years old. But I agree that it's not a good adjective because I had the exact same first thought. Both "natural" and "stonewall" would be better, and they're not great names either. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=natural%20stone%20walls&ko=-1&iax…

There's no gravity here, so the comparison makes no sense. In walls masonry construction produces sheer lines horizontally, an axis gravity is not bearing upon. This feels like taking the metaphor just a tad too literally.

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

#68

Post by doctor_eval »

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…

I want to say something about monolithic kernels but I’m too scared.

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

#69

Post by kevincox »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #51
rezonant wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reasonable fallback when JS is not present or hasn't yet executed, and that's not acceptable. I can't stress enough how important this is for content experiences. Your content must display reasonably before all bells and whistles load, and when the bells and whistles load, your content had better not shift dramatically (ideally not at all).

I would expect most browsers that aren't running JS do not properly handle state of the art CSS extensions.

Or is your average email client? Many of these support modern HTML with scripting and remote content disabled.

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

#70

Post by Joker_vD »

afavour wrote: post #64
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.

I’m a web programmer and I find it comprehensible. Sure there are times I need to go to the docs but vast majority of the time I can work with it just fine. I’d agree that it probably is incomprehensible to many visual designers but unfortunately so is code in general. CSS is complex, especially these days, but I feel like those who don’t work with the web every day simply don’t get to experience it often enough to k…

Of course it is, there is even the word "masonry" in TFA's name!
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