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Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

gridstylesheets.org

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Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#71

Post by coldtea »

paulojreis wrote: post #56
coldtea wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the layout, the major composition, is thought (typically) out of a grid system. And that's what, I believe, a designer focus on. Not on individual element rules, but on the whole. That might be true for print designers of yore, but we've moved beyond that in the last 10 years or so. Designers today know that it's not about some static composition on top of some grid. And they also know that individual elements…

Moved beyond grid systems? I can't agree with that. Also, I don't really see the connection you're implying between using a grid and having a static composition or not considering individual elements behaviour. I do compose out of a grid system; the best designers (or the real designers) I worked with do the same. And that doesn't mean that we won't specify how the profile pic responds to resize - we do. It's just th…

>Moved beyond grid systems? I can't agree with that.

Good, because I haven't said so. I said we've moved beyond static designs on top of some grid.

When you add different screen sizes, resizing and interaction to the mix, the grid itself gets dynamic, and relationships between items (constrains) matter more than visual placement.

>It's just that it is a detail. It's not layout, it's not the composition.

The thing is that seems to me a relic of print design.

In modern UI design there's no fixed composition as such. Even whole elements might appear and disappear at will, based on the app's state.

Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#72

Post by thrownaway122 »

shocks wrote: post #37
thrownaway122 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> javascript should be optional if possible I got a blank page so I closed the tab. Any page that requires javascript and I don't need to use (at the level of do my taxes) or that I don't trust the owners of gets the same treatment. So yeah optional javascript is a thing unless 100% of your audience are absolutely required to use your site. EDIT given that sites today use google analytics instead of their own server…

You are a minority. Perhaps not here (HN) because "I disable Javascript" seems to be a pretty trendy thing to say (:P), but in the world at large you are. It's bad enough we have to build websites that work on IE8. We have to worry about screen readers and other accessibility problems, but we also have to worry about a fraction of users that disable a fundamental browser feature literally every site uses? Nah. It'll…

For text and images and videos (which is what a webpage is for after all) if one sticks to a simple html and simple set of css do you need to worry about all those issues? Or do they just go away? e.g could a simple html version served to e.g. screen-reader using users also work for non-javascript using users?

>literally every site uses

Ironic that you would post that on a site that works without it...

Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#73

Post by thrownaway122 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #21
thrownaway122 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> javascript should be optional if possible I got a blank page so I closed the tab. Any page that requires javascript and I don't need to use (at the level of do my taxes) or that I don't trust the owners of gets the same treatment. So yeah optional javascript is a thing unless 100% of your audience are absolutely required to use your site. EDIT given that sites today use google analytics instead of their own server…

There are unlikely to be more than about 100 people who would do that, it is just that most of them post here.

Well there is an addon for firefox (no script) that assists with it... I guess that that only has 100 users?

Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#74

Post by archagon »

hamstergene wrote: post #60

As GUI dev who worked with Apple's AutoLayout extensively I can confidently say constraint-based layout is a trap. It looks like more intuitive way to go on simple examples, but complexity spikes quickly as number of controls goes up. It's more complicated, more resilient to changes (harder to maintain), easy to get wrong, hard to understand and debug, bugs generally look uglier (what would be minor misplacement in C…

I agree with your assessment, but for certain use cases, I've found it to be pretty useful. Box-based layout forces you to arrange your view hierarchy in a Towers of Hanoi kind of way, whereas constraint-based layout lets you define relationships between free-floating sibling views directly. Here's[1] a little test I recently worked on; the amount of code to do this was pretty small and conceptually simple.

[1]: https://github.com/archagon/ABExpandingViewController/blob/m...

Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#75

Post by thrownaway122 »

thrownaway122 wrote: post #4
Qantourisc wrote: post #3

I'd love to use this. But in the back of my head I still think javascript should be optional if possible ... not that 99% of the rest of the world cares ...

> javascript should be optional if possible I got a blank page so I closed the tab. Any page that requires javascript and I don't need to use (at the level of do my taxes) or that I don't trust the owners of gets the same treatment. So yeah optional javascript is a thing unless 100% of your audience are absolutely required to use your site. EDIT given that sites today use google analytics instead of their own server…

So in reponse to all the javascript brigade here I just tried to view some websites I commonly visit without blocking to see what I'm mising...

I do not know how you browse with javascript enabled! WOW the experience is poor! My computer is a standstill with two tabs open. Stuff keeps flashing at me. The pages load and then after a few seconds everything gets moved around again. Simple functionality doesn't work as I'd expect anymore (every website seems to be different in how things work). Adverts everywhere (and everytime an advert refreshs I can see my computer slowing down).

EDIT and now (some) videos start autoplaying when I scroll past them. I don't want that!

Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#76

Post by thrownaway122 »

coldtea wrote: post #42
thrownaway122 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> javascript should be optional if possible I got a blank page so I closed the tab. Any page that requires javascript and I don't need to use (at the level of do my taxes) or that I don't trust the owners of gets the same treatment. So yeah optional javascript is a thing unless 100% of your audience are absolutely required to use your site. EDIT given that sites today use google analytics instead of their own server…

> I got a blank page so I closed the tab. Any page that requires javascript and I don't need to use (at the level of do my taxes) or that I don't trust the owners of gets the same treatment. It's not like that behavior matters. That's about 0.001% of computer users. Might as well say "If it's not available in Gopher format I don't care".

Yes but that 0.001% are within the influencial 1% of users. I've literally had people see what webpages look like in my browser and then ask for no script installed. I didn't understand why until a few minutes ago but I do now.

Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#77

Post by adrusi »

gambiter wrote: post #67
coldtea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'cause if you're on my team, i'll slap you Because you're so macho, right? And anything you don't understand shouldn't be used. [EDIT] I find the sample code quite readable -- as long as one understands that it does more than constraints in that example, and that you of course have to read on the symbols to get them, like you'd have to read on Ruby's @, C's * and &, on regular expressions, etc. But this macho talk…

I thought personal attacks weren't allowed on HN? EDIT: And apparently calling you out on it leads to immediate downvotes. Wow, this really is turning into reddit.

People don't like meta-discussion. It's not punishing you for calling out someone they like, it's about burying discussion topics they don't want to see derail the conversation.

I did not vote down.

Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#78

Post by CodexArcanum »

I must admit a certain trepidation anytime I hear the phrase, "and replace it with a constraint solver!" Not that they aren't useful and powerful tools. That's exactly the problem, they're very powerful tools. I'm not entirely convinced that doing website layout should require so much computing power.

Also, ironically, the site looks pretty bad on mobile and the entire left side of the page is chopped off. I don't take any "new ideas in style" page seriously if the mobile (or desktop, or whatever I'm using) experience on that page is bad.

Re: Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver

#79

Post by adrusi »

shocks wrote: post #37
thrownaway122 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> javascript should be optional if possible I got a blank page so I closed the tab. Any page that requires javascript and I don't need to use (at the level of do my taxes) or that I don't trust the owners of gets the same treatment. So yeah optional javascript is a thing unless 100% of your audience are absolutely required to use your site. EDIT given that sites today use google analytics instead of their own server…

You are a minority. Perhaps not here (HN) because "I disable Javascript" seems to be a pretty trendy thing to say (:P), but in the world at large you are. It's bad enough we have to build websites that work on IE8. We have to worry about screen readers and other accessibility problems, but we also have to worry about a fraction of users that disable a fundamental browser feature literally every site uses? Nah. It'll…

You have to make your site accessible to search engines, so as long as you're not doing something weird like using javascript for styling and layout, just treating users who have disabled javascript as search engines should work just fine.
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