CSS arrow please • Hacker News Board

Re: CSS arrow please

#71

Post by haberman » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:03 AM UTC

davegauer wrote: post #70

freditup wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I suck at CSS too. I still think there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but that's probably more a marker on my own ignorance than anything. Anyway, I do have fun playing around with the FF style tools. It is quite cool and informative.

CSS was clearly designed with typography and text layout in mind - and it works wonderfully for that purpose. But it was not created flexibly enough to be well suited for anything else. You CAN make graphical interfaces with it (and we do, because we have to). But it's all hacks. I think the browser inconsistencies are as frustrating as they are because doing seemingly "simple" things in CSS requires using advanced C…

> It never ceases to amaze me how quickly people jump to defend CSS as if any criticisms imply that the author thinks we'd be better off back in the days of deeply nested tables.

Could not agree more. Tech people are weird sometimes.

The same thing repeats itself in other contexts; for example people hate to hear criticism of git, because to many people it is the be-all-end-all of version control. But just because it's better than what came before doesn't mean there's not room to improve it even further.

Re: CSS arrow please

#72

Post by necolas » Thu, May 10, 2012, 4:46 AM UTC

I made a bunch of this kind (and more complex) speech bubbles a couple of years ago: http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-speech-bubbles/demo/

This is a nice little tool to help automate the production of the code for simple ones.

Re: CSS arrow please

#73

Post by Skalman » Thu, May 10, 2012, 8:06 AM UTC

esrauch wrote: post #68

scizo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also want to consider explicitly setting the box-sizing to content-box. I know that is the default, but if someone attempted to use this and had already adjusted the box-sizing to something else it would not work.

There are dozens of rules someone could already have on the page that would break it, why make a special case for box-sizing?

Because it's not unheard of to set * { box-sizing: border-box; }. In the same way, you shouldn't assume margin, padding or font-size to be anything in particular.

Re: CSS arrow please

#74

Post by RoryH » Thu, May 10, 2012, 8:13 AM UTC

Brilliant, I have a use case for this, nice timing :-)

Re: CSS arrow please

#75

Post by jenius » Fri, May 11, 2012, 5:27 PM UTC

rralian wrote: post #53

jenius wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're totally right. I have a mixin that makes a bubble like that too, but it's built from a few different mixins that each build on each other and I didn't want to post a buttload of code in a comment. You can see an example of how mine looks if you hit this page ( http://roots.carrotbeta.com/docs/ ) and scroll down to the UI section

That's a pretty groovy framework, thanks for sharing. Nice work.

thanks! it's closed and not yet public right now because the docs aren't finished yet - but this is how they look. I plan to have every section be live customizable and reflect implementation with a live code example to the left as is the case with the typography section. once the docs are done I'm planning on open sourcing it. If you want to use it and/or test it out, hit me on twitter @jescalan

Re: CSS arrow please

#76

Post by freditup » Thu, May 17, 2012, 6:59 AM UTC

davegauer wrote: post #70

freditup wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I suck at CSS too. I still think there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but that's probably more a marker on my own ignorance than anything. Anyway, I do have fun playing around with the FF style tools. It is quite cool and informative.

CSS was clearly designed with typography and text layout in mind - and it works wonderfully for that purpose. But it was not created flexibly enough to be well suited for anything else. You CAN make graphical interfaces with it (and we do, because we have to). But it's all hacks. I think the browser inconsistencies are as frustrating as they are because doing seemingly "simple" things in CSS requires using advanced C…

Late reply, but that's how I feel somewhat. I feel like CSS isn't intuitive at all for an application layout. I've done layouts in other markup languages and had a blast, but when I hit HTML and CSS, I just feel generally confused. Again, I hardly ever do web design, so it could just be ignorance on my part, but I still feel CSS could use a makeover instead of incremental changes.