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by louzell 1082 days ago
It's hard to argue against the power of separating content from presentation when we can see the results with our own eyes in a couple clicks on Zen Garden. I have a hard time seeing how the disparaging title of "architecture astronaut" is warranted by it.
2 comments
kaba0 1081 days ago
HTML and CSS has overlapping control over many properties on how a given document is rendered, so Zen Garden is more like “check out this Turing complete program written in CSS” — cute and interesting, but it is not practical as we can see from.. literally no real website doing anything remotely like that. This myth came from a time when we had markdown-level HTML markups, and it made sense back then: sure, why not let me color headers red? But it doesn’t scale as it simply doesn’t compose. That cascading part doesn’t make sense for many properties: should padding be inherited? It basically never makes sense. Components are the sane building blocks (as has been realized by desktop GUIs decades ago), and we are much better off with strong encapsulation here (shadow dom is a welcome change).
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isleyaardvark 1082 days ago
That power is only for the contrived example of doing a complete redesign that doesn’t change any of the html content. It’s like one of those demos people make of a CSS-only thingamajig that would be much easier to do any other technology. It makes for an interesting tech demo but isn’t practical for day-to-day development.
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Clamchop 1082 days ago
Templates, themeable products like WordPress, dark modes and alt accessibility presentations...
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imbnwa 1082 days ago
>That power is only for the contrived example of doing a complete redesign that doesn’t change any of the html content.

Didn't Github just re-style their whole UI? Presuming that's an extreme possibility seems like premature optimization unless you run Product.

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isleyaardvark 1082 days ago
That’s more like YAGNI.

The other comment made a good point about WP templates, I can only speak to my own experience. I have mostly worked on projects where I could edit the HTML, and in those cases using a Tailwind-like methodology was dramatically easier. Even when doing a full-site redesign.

So if you are designing for a project where you are unable to edit HTML, sure, use the right tools for the right. Or if the bulk of your coding time is spent doing full site redesigns instead of updates to an existing design, then it wouldn’t be the right approach. I wouldn’t use it on a project intended to be white-labelled, otherwise that’s the methodology I’d use.

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