Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
wiki.csswg.org
Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
1–10 of 147 posts
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#2The Entire front end web stack looks like a design mistake.
Backend looks better only because of the flexibility. You can do anything in the back. But the front you're locked into multi decade old tech and the decade old wrappers written around it.
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#3The Entire front end web stack looks like a design mistake. Backend looks better only because of the flexibility. You can do anything in the back. But the front you're locked into multi decade old tech and the decade old wrappers written around it.
I disagree. First of all, all of computing is locked into decades-only technology: assembler language and machine instructions. Everything comes down to that whether you write front or back end and regardless of what other "tech" is in the middle.
Today, we can do anything on the front end. Some of the most popular and complex apps in history are front end apps made with JS/HTML and web components (Discord, Spotify, Photoshop for Web, YouTube, and many others.)
The reason that this "stack" has survived and thrived is precisely that it does, at this point, allow front end devs to do anything and to do it in a way that runs everywhere. And that's a Very Good Thing.
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#4While many of these are obvious and don't need further explanation, the article would benefit a lot from showing a few simple examples for some of these items, or a justification for why the author's proposed naming is better.
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#5Backwards compatibility may be a fundamental design philosophy of the web, but wouldn't it still be possible to support a different document format with a new programming model that gives us a clean break from the past? It's a naive question, I realize, but it's tantalizing to imagine what we could have if we went that route.
Then again, the cynic in me thinks we'd just endlessly fight over the design decisions anyways.
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#6>That should be corrected
There used to be a PostCSS plugin that did fix some of these, for example you could write "white-space: no-wrap" and it would compile to "nowrap" (which is syntactically correct). I can't remember what it was called.
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#7While many of these are obvious and don't need further explanation, the article would benefit a lot from showing a few simple examples for some of these items, or a justification for why the author's proposed naming is better.
Yeah without a demo, it's hard even for me to grasp why some of them are mistakes, and I've been writing CSS since 2009.
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#8The Entire front end web stack looks like a design mistake. Backend looks better only because of the flexibility. You can do anything in the back. But the front you're locked into multi decade old tech and the decade old wrappers written around it.
This article is just about CSS not the entire frontend web stack.
Curious though, do you consider server-side-rendered components "frontend?"
What about React Server Components?
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#9> background-position and border-spacing (all 2-axis properties) should take vertical first, to match with the 4-direction properties like margin.
I hate that margin / padding short-hands, especially with 2 values, expect vertical first.
In my head it's always (x,y) and (width,height) – always horizontal then vertical, I feel like it works like this everywhere else?
Now my issue is that I've committed to memory that margin and padding short-hands work the exact opposite way I would expect, so sometimes I still mix them up because I type them 'correctly' and then flip them because I memorized it like that..
Re: Mistakes in the Design of CSS (2013)
#10I thought "!important" was always about appealing to the emotions of overwhelmed and confused CSS authors as it seems to make the computer "listen to you" when it doesn't seem to be.
I remember this notorious book
https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Killer-Sites-David-Siegel/dp...
about techniques used to get pixel perfect results with HTML back in the 1990s. The author of that book was quite impressed with CSS as it really does give designers great tools to work with, but it's still got the problem that designers find it hard to be disciplined with. That is, a lot of designers are stuck in a "let's draw a pretty picture" mindset but find it hard to think like "let's develop a system that makes it easy to draw lots of pretty pictures". Thus we get a lot of things like bootstrap and tailwind that erode the idea of CSS classes being somewhat semantic and being related to the structure of the system (e.g. this particular toolbar as it manifests in this application) as opposed to "a generic toolbar that comes out of a framework" or "something that has 15px of margin".)