Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is it still hard to express layouts in HTML?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–7 of 7 posts

Why is it still hard to express layouts in HTML?

#1

Post by thebearmaster »

CSS still seems to be pretty painful at expressing layouts, such as the main object for the page centred vertically and overlapping other elements to the left / right of it. There are many articles about them, but they all seem to explain to you how to do this painful thing, rather than explaining how its done elegantly.

It makes me curious about whether we should even expect to wish such things for a nice web experience, i.e. if the standards committees even consider these as they discuss specs and direction. Should one even expect these things to become as easy as, say, working with lists or paragraphs?

Re: Why is it still hard to express layouts in HTML?

#3

Post by doomrobo »

The problem is not with HTML, it's with representation of complex visual structures using text. I don't believe that it can get much better than this. Obviously some things can be made easier by making shortcuts and making things more predictable when you're writing HTML, but you are still constrained to a textual representation for something that is, by nature, visual. GUI editors would probably be the most natural way of designing web pages but they often produce ugly and inefficient HTML that can be a pain to deal with. IMO there is no better way, except for improving the output of GUI editors.

Re: Why is it still hard to express layouts in HTML?

#4

Post by ablerman »

doomrobo wrote: post #3

The problem is not with HTML, it's with representation of complex visual structures using text. I don't believe that it can get much better than this. Obviously some things can be made easier by making shortcuts and making things more predictable when you're writing HTML, but you are still constrained to a textual representation for something that is, by nature, visual. GUI editors would probably be the most natural…

This is something that Flex excels at. Perhaps the only thing that I really miss.

For instance, in flex, to do a 3 column layout, I could do something like:

  
     
       [Content]
     
     
       [Content]
     
     
       [Content]

Re: Why is it still hard to express layouts in HTML?

#6

Post by tptacek »

ablerman wrote: post #4
doomrobo wrote: post #3

The problem is not with HTML, it's with representation of complex visual structures using text. I don't believe that it can get much better than this. Obviously some things can be made easier by making shortcuts and making things more predictable when you're writing HTML, but you are still constrained to a textual representation for something that is, by nature, visual. GUI editors would probably be the most natural…

This is something that Flex excels at. Perhaps the only thing that I really miss. For instance, in flex, to do a 3 column layout, I could do something like: [Content] [Content] [Content]

I guess I'm not really understanding this thread, because doesn't virtually any CSS grid system give you the same capability?

Re: Why is it still hard to express layouts in HTML?

#7

Post by thebearmaster »

tptacek wrote: post #6
ablerman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that Flex excels at. Perhaps the only thing that I really miss. For instance, in flex, to do a 3 column layout, I could do something like: [Content] [Content] [Content]

I guess I'm not really understanding this thread, because doesn't virtually any CSS grid system give you the same capability?

Grid systems give you the ability to express things in terms of, well, grids - the components of the grid would not overlap. I didn't see anything in Bootstrap or Foundation that would help me position overlapping elements effectively, e.g. a stack of playing cards with each card offset vertically from the previous one.
Post reply on HN