I saw yet another “CSS is a massively bloated mess” whine and I’m like. My dude. My brother in Chromium. It is trying as hard as it can to express the totality of visual presentation and layout design and typography and animation and digital interactivity and a few other things in a human-readable text format. It’s not bloated, it’s fantastically ambitious. Its reach is greater than most of us can hope to grasp. Put some *respect* on its *name*.
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@Meyerweb and it's doing that while being far more efficient about it than any javascript or wasm could ever even dream of writing
@Meyerweb too bad the w3c is a google production which makes it impossible for users to provide any input on the format. is there a reason it needs to be human-readable without any form of intermediate representation? is there a reason it must support the entire universe of interactivity along with layout? part of the reason browsers are sites of monopolistic coercion is the lack of ability to break down these burgeoning standards into component parts. there's no alternative to CSS because it has swallowed up the alternatives.
@hipsterelectron
Can you expand or give examples of an intermediate representation? Not sure what you mean.
@Meyerweb
@Meyerweb
How do you not look upon CSS and weep at its majesty
@jonny @Meyerweb I can answer this question! I have a lot of criticisms of CSS. A few of them come from experience, but most of them come from reading CSSWG drafts.
Look at https://drafts.csswg.org/css-gaps-1/. Isn't it great? That's a draft I picked at random. I'm sure I'll think it's utter tosh once someone's written detailed criticisms and designed something ten times better, but right now, it's great. But CSS doesn't have these features yet, and therefore, it is deficient for the lack.
@wizzwizz4
@Meyerweb
OK that is fair, it is valid to criticize a monumental multi-decade project to do something that seems impossible for not having ended history and completed all possible features yet
@jonny @Meyerweb The CSS people have got wise to my strategy, and have started separating CSS into elegant self-contained modules, which augment but do not wholly supersede what came before; but a careful study of CSSWG drafts can still find places where the designers of yore made a minor mistake which we can place undue emphasis on for the purpose of trash-talking.
@jonny @Meyerweb Honestly, though, most of the problems with CSS lie at the feet of the Original Sin of Unicode: attempting to describe the combined behaviour of scripts with incompatible writing rules – the so-called "bidi text algorithm" https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/uba-basics –, rather than just sticking to reading-order semantics and leaving layout to the presentation layer.
In HTML, this creates messes below the level of the DOM, which no amount of CSS can ever fix.
There is no such thing as plain text.
@wizzwizz4
@Meyerweb
I didnt expect the criticism of CSS to extend all the way down to "it uses unicode characters" but I suppose that too is valid criticism, since all written language was a mistake