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by bingemaker 189 days ago
I'm not sure turning CSS into a full blown language is a good idea. With all the cascading in place, it is already a bit hard to determine why certain styles are applied. Now with this, we will be spending more brain cells debugging CSS issues.
2 comments
lmm 189 days ago
On the contrary, a lot of the reason CSS is confusing is because it's full of insane hacks people have to do to get the behaviour they want. A straight-up if statement is much simpler than many of the horrors I've seen.
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alwillis 188 days ago
>On the contrary, a lot of the reason CSS is confusing is because it's full of insane hacks people have to do to get the behaviour they want.

CSS is confusing because the vast majority of web developers never learned it properly. Many developers won't learn any "new" CSS (like CSS Grid which shipped in all browsers in 2017) beyond the hacks they learned in the '90s and early 2000's.

That's not the fault of CSS.

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lmm 187 days ago
> CSS is confusing because the vast majority of web developers never learned it properly. Many developers won't learn any "new" CSS (like CSS Grid which shipped in all browsers in 2017) beyond the hacks they learned in the '90s and early 2000's.

Disagree. The newer stuff is, if anything, more confusing. The old stuff, awful as it was, at least had a consistent model.

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alwillis 185 days ago
> Disagree. The newer stuff is, if anything, more confusing. The old stuff, awful as it was, at least had a consistent model.

With the "old stuff", we didn't a layout model or an alignment model. Everything required float and positioning hacks to do things they weren't designed to do. There's no logical way that was "better."

There were several different grid systems, all mostly incompatible with each other, which were required to do anything interesting.

Many layouts that are common today were impossible to do with just HTML & CSS back in '90s and 2000's.

Capabilities that almost all developers had to reach for a framework Bootstrap or Foundation for are built-in to CSS today. Or lots of JavaScript.

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adgjlsfhk1 189 days ago
css definitely shouldn't have backwards branches (loops/recursive functions), but adding a little more power can clean up expression a ton and make reading/applying that much faster
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lenkite 189 days ago
I wish the "little more power" would add CSS modules. It would also be great if web components didn't require Javascript and could be configured with pure HTML and CSS.

I will kiss the feet of the whatwg groups if they do this.

PS: Would also love to have declarative template inclusion now that removal of XSLT has also removed this facility from the browser.

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