Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xpinguin 3976 days ago
Well, I feel exactly the opposite. Although, I had no chance to write gtk theming engines due to lack of neccessity, I would argue that most of the time clear good ol' imperative chunk of simple and straightforward C is far better than arcane declarative CSS based on whatever underlying rules I am not fully aware of.

P.S. I has experience with both - besides writing my decent share of C code over the course of past 10-or-so years, I had an opportunity to write stylesheets in pre-HTML5 times (for money). Later was far more sane and flexible (yet a bit arcane due to multi-browser compatibility) than writing on pseudo-CSS in order to compactife modern Eclipse (4.x). No way I would believe that pseudo-CSS for constantly unstable underlying engine could be somehow better than "clunky, complex loadable modules in C".

1 comments

> imperative chunk of simple and straightforward C is far better than arcane declarative CSS based

Nope, consider yourself lucky if you have never heard the horror stories about the old theming code (and even more lucky from the fact that you never had to poke at it). :)

P.S. Me too, I worked at a small studio developing web apps for a few year, then moved to optimizing HTML/JS/CSS3 apps running on a custom WebKit enviroment with animations, transitions and whatnot on a embedded (and horribly low-powered) platform and now I have the pleasure of trying to make WebKit work well on the Raspberry Pi.

As far as I can tell, CSS is several orders of magnitude better than poking at C code for those purposes.