81–90 of 359 posts
> 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.
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.
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.
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…
CSS may be complex, but you get a huge bang for the buck in terms of UX, rendering performance, flexibility, accessibility, compared to most drawing and layout systems. You could argue against border-radius and flex as well, but Im glad we’re past clearfix and gifs for corners. Does masonry layout qualify for becoming standard? I don’t know.
This is just an accident of history and not because CSS has anything that makes it intrinsically better than the alternatives.
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…
It’s the same kind of growth pattern as government bureaucracies. Those are largely not conspiracies either, despite the occasional optics.
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…
What is the composable unix approach for layout/graphical interfaces?
When you had enough of using text as the single data structure in a shell, you can start doing the same with a GUI toolkit.
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.
> 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.
Since bricks have some tensile strength, but mortar (the 'glue' between rows and columns) has ~none, that means that, if you must have lines of weakness, you would prefer they be horizontal than vertical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would expect most browsers that aren't running JS do not properly handle state of the art CSS extensions.
Such browsers can also get by based on the semantic ordering of content within the document, which will more closely match the visual reality when a masonry type layout is used. The alternative of defining several columns leads to at least one column being shoved all the way at the end of the document after the previous column, whereas in a masonry layout that wouldn't be the case. This is where a proper solution to…
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…