| > for what I'm doing (a pretty complex web app with an almost desktop-style GUI with a bunch of buttons, text inputs and checkboxes everywhere) Right. There's different contexts between an application an a (hyper)text document. What's good semantic markup for one, will generally be bad for the other. It's admirable (and desirable) to strive for adaptive layout and accessibility in applications - but they need a different type of framework than documents made for browsers. The browsers straddle this divide rather uncomfortably - being in part hypertext document browsers, and in part virtual machines for running general applications. Approaches like web components[1] might help us move toward a standardised reality for "applications that happen to run in the browser", while css and html are still (more and more anachronistically) (hypertext) document markup and layout tools. If you want to make a Web page/site (like alistapart.com) that's great. Swim with the current and draw inspiration from stuff like css zen garden[2]. With flex box, you can burn[4] most of the old complicated grid layout stuff, and comparatively easily make great sites. That doesn't really help if you're a "front-end developer" making "apps" though. Even the few that make an effort to color within the lines are still fighting the browsers and the standard, trying to fit a code-on-demand app into a REST shoe[3]. [1] https://www.webcomponents.org/ [2] http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13500635
(I've said it before - the true tragedy isn't that too few read Fielding's thesis and never understood REST - It's that so many ignore that he covered a lot of other architectures that are more suitable for many applications than REST is) [4] https://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by-flexbox/demos/grids... |