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masa331 | 7 months ago

Can you be more specific here? HTML and CSS can't be described like that in my opinion.

It is complex but not complicated. You can start with just a few small parts and get to a usable and clean document within hours from the first contact with the languages. The tags and rules are usually quite self-describing while consice and there are tons and tons of good docs and tools. The development of the standards is also open and you can peek there if you want to understand decisions and rationals.

discuss

order

yegle|7 months ago

You could say the existing browser vendors pushed to make the HTML standard more complicated to the point that there's no chance for a newcomer to compete with the existing ones.

Voultapher|7 months ago

Ladybird would like a word.

Though I agree that the web standards are extremely large. Not sure if they are too large, given their cross-platform near OS layer functionality.

alterom|7 months ago

It's not about making a document.

It's about making software that would display a document in that format correctly.

I.e., a browser.

perching_aix|7 months ago

The current HTML spec alone is a 1000+ page PDF, and I can't imagine the CSS spec being much shorter.

Wordsmithing your way around this doesn't make them any easier.

acdha|7 months ago

Sure, technical documents are long but that still doesn’t support the original claim that they are “unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted” and it’s actually evidence against the assertion that they’re “difficult to implement without specific knowledge of its features”: most of why those are long documents is that they carefully detail how necessarily complex systems interact in sufficient detail to implement them whereas the Office XML specs at least historically had things like flags telling to behave like, say, Word95 without fully specifying the behaviour in question.

masa331|7 months ago

Sure the spec might be enormous but you don't need to touch it at all to be productive quickly. In no HTML or CSS tutorial i'v ever seen was a reference to the spec nor did i need to go there to solve something. And that in itself is another proof how nicely it is designed actually. Because on the other hand there are other document types or schemas where you absolutely have to go to the spec because it's is so cryptic and badly designed and not self-explaining that there is nothing else you can do.