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dmethvin | 5 years ago

> If CSS was designed the way it is just to satisfy the constraints of 1996, then maybe that gives us permission 20 years later to do things a little differently.

Yeah, just like we can choose which side of the road to drive on or pick any arbitrary character encoding for an 8-bit byte.

discuss

lkrubner|5 years ago

Driving on one side of the road offers no obvious benefits compared to driving on the other side of the road whereas getting rid of HTML and CSS offers obvious benefits and is long overdue.

cookiengineer|5 years ago

Everybody talks about replacing CSS, yet nobody comes up with a feasible solution.

Layouting is hard. Very hard.

I mean, there's a reason why ooxml or docx are so similar to CSS, and why PDF is so broken that it's a candy store for exploits.

Both object and functional oriented replacements always have led to a lot of redundancy compared to their compiled CSS equivalents. And usually you cannot model layouts as flexible as with CSS' different flow models.

Everybody that says CSS can be replaced with something simple usually hasn't even thought of print stylesheets, media queries, or why the box model and flow model got so complicated.

The spec authors had very good reasons to make changes to the CSS spec(s).

jameshart|5 years ago

> Driving on one side of the road offers no obvious benefits compared to driving on the other side

If that were true, then why did Sweden go to the trouble to change in 1967?

The fact that they did so, and that doing so was to improve interoperability with neighboring systems, might give you some clue why getting rid of CSS and HTML requires more than mere 'obvious benefits' to justify it.

hombre_fatal|5 years ago

What are the obvious benefits?

My experience is that people who tend to disparage web tech don't have much experience building clients in general, so they think building web clients is hard and annoying because it's the web without realizing it's because it's a client.

asldkjaslkdj|5 years ago

HTML and CSS have been evolving for over two decades (now maybe faster than ever) and have been battle tested by nearly 2 billion websites.

It seems crazy to me to think that we should throw it all out and do something new. I suspect contributing to the improvement of the existing spec is a much more pragmatic endeavor.

hansvm|5 years ago

Or in this day and age to even choose that a byte has 8 bits.