Ask Håkon About CSS or...?

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @05:31AM from the partly-to-blame-for-web-2.0 dept.

Back in 1994, while working for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Håkon Wium Lie (pronounced more or less "how come") proposed the idea of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Got a CSS question? An Ajax question? Want to know why Håkon loves Free Software so much? Or something else, related or not? Go ahead and ask -- after checking some of the links above, so you don't duplicate questions he's answered in other interviews or in articles he's written. (One question per post, please.) We hope to post his answers Friday.

18 of 326 comments (clear)

Re:Just one question by emo+boy · 2006-06-20 05:37 · Score: 5, Interesting

Did you ever think CSS would take off like it has and what do you think is the biggest misuse of CSS today in your opinion?

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___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2006-06-20 05:37 · Score: 5, Funny

Free software is destroying american jobs. Why do you hate america?
Padding by Anonymous Coward · 2006-06-20 05:43 · Score: 5, Interesting

Why was the decision made to make padding apply outside of the width of a 'box', rather than inside, which would seem to make more sense?
1. Re:Padding by Anonymous Coward · 2006-06-20 06:01 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  In addition: Was an concideration given to the effect that this would have on blocks using percentages for sizes? Is any concideration being given to fixing the problems that this causes?
2. Re:Padding by pikine · 2006-06-20 07:27 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Space inside the box is the "padding," while space around (outside) the box is the "margin." Between "padding" and "margin," there is also a "border." I'm not sure if asking how the terminology is determined is very interesting.
  
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  I once had a signature.
No, really! -- a slashdot editor wrote this! by Qubit · 2006-06-20 05:43 · Score: 5, Funny

Go ahead and ask -- after checking some of the links above, so you don't duplicate questions he's answered in other interviews or in articles he's written.

Duplicates? On Slashdot? Surely you jest, sir!

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coding is life /* the rest is */
1. Re:No, really! -- a slashdot editor wrote this! by colinbrash · 2006-06-20 06:19 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Duplicates? On Slashdot? Surely you jest, sir!
Why is CSS such a good idea but a pain to use? by 1155 · 2006-06-20 05:44 · Score: 5, Interesting

CSS is a great idea, separating content from everything else. My problem with it is that it's such a horrendous beast of a thing to implement. For instance, there's nothing really good for say, putting something into "the middle" from what I can find. Now if there is, fine, don't make this question about the example. There are literally hundreds of design decisions that feel like they were implemented in a way to just make things as difficult as they can be.

Why is CSS such a pain compared to other languages?
1. Re:Why is CSS such a good idea but a pain to use? by rar · 2006-06-20 09:57 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  ... There are literally hundreds of design decisions that feel like they were implemented in a way to just make things as difficult as they can be.
  
  I'd like to try to turn your observation into a more specific question:
  
  CSS is clearly very useful for separating style from content. But apparently people tend to have problems when using it for layouts. Would you say this is because people have not yet understood how to properly do layout in CSS, or is it CSS that is lacking in this area? What can be done to improve the situation? --- Would the web benefit from HTML and CSS being complemented with some kind of "layout language"?
  
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  Open Materials Database
Re:Just one question by FooAtWFU · 2006-06-20 05:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

On the topic of "misues of CSS", what's your take on the mess of CSS incompatibilities between Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera, W3C standards, and the like? Do you have any choice words for any of the parties involved?

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The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Re: Two questions by Dolda2000 · 2006-06-20 05:50 · Score: 5, Interesting

Oops, messed up the formatting -- trying again:
1. What would you most like to change with CSS? That is, if you could go back in time and change one thing in the spec and have it reflected today, what would be the most important thing?
2. If you were allowed (perhaps by court order, which wouldn't be unthinkable) to force Microsoft to do one (1) change in Internet Explorer, what would that be?
As a bonus question: What do you think of Slashdot's CSS? ;)
Included styles, aliases by Spy+der+Mann · 2006-06-20 05:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

I always wanted to have "included" substyles or "aliases" in my CSS definition, to save redundancy.

(For includes)
.class1 { color:#ff0000; } .class2 { background-color:#ffffff; } .class3 { include:class1,class2;font-weight:bold; }
(For aliases)
@alias color1 #ff0000; @alias color2 #ffffff; @alias default_image url('/img/image1.jpg'); .class1 { color:color1; } .class2 { background-image:default_image;background-color:co lor2; }
This way we could change colors or images for a whole webpage by editing a reduced number of lines.

Had you considered any of these ideas in the past? If so, why were they rejected?
CSS Evolution! by eieken · 2006-06-20 05:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

Is the wave of webpages designed completely in CSS what you intially intended when you came up with CSS? Do you see that changing? Is that good or bad?

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Meet new people, and kill them.
About Microsoft... by Chabil+Ha' · 2006-06-20 06:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

With MS's next browser release (IE 7), you mentioned in other interviews that their decision to not supprt CSS2 was more a political decision than a mechanical one. Aside from their obvious desire to dominate the world, what politics do you think are in play that make them not want to conform to the standard, and what do you think would change that landscape so that they would have some initiative to fully support it?

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We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Vertical CSS Support by infestedsenses · 2006-06-20 06:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

As a developer who works with CSS every day, I find one complication that continues to bother me in my daily work. Support for CSS has always been good on the horizontal scope, but vertical positioning has always been quite complicated. Alone the procedure to affix a footer to the bottom of a screen in dependance of the amount of content is unnecessarily difficult, spawning hackish solutions such as "footerStickAlt". Centering an object in the dead center of a page also requires strange procedures such as this one, which still aren't ideal (try making the viewport really small). The old table method provided much easier methods for this. What are your thoughts on this and do you see improvement following in future CSS revisions?

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parasight.de
Misuse and Suggestions by lord_sarpedon · 2006-06-20 06:23 · Score: 5, Interesting

Do you think that CSS is often misused? It seems to me that it is rarely used to define presentation in media other than the screen. As for my ideal stylesheet language... 1) Why must the layout be so linear? It seems to me that it would make more sense to have it operate closer to Autodesk Inventor, if you have ever used it, such that you set up whatever constraints (equal, parallel, etc) you see fit and the agent displaying the content finds a suitable solution. As an example, the login div must be equal width as the sidebar div, the sidebar div is at the left of the screen, the navbar is at the top of the screen and above the sidebar, and the content div is below the navbar and to the right of the sidebar. If everything is in a box, it would make sense to use other boxes as a reference point, rather than the screen. Pixels and percentages are nice and all, but not altogether natural. And pixels, while tempting, often don't cater to different resolutions. 2) Why would a spec for something that needs to be pixel-precise not come with an example implementation? 3) Shouldn't you be able to affect the document tree in a small way? If you are truly separating content and presentation, then why must I change the content to get the effect I want? I do this with XML + XSL + CSS, but just being able to add a div or image here and there would be nice...

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"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
Definition of pixel by Sara+Chan · 2006-06-20 07:35 · Score: 5, Interesting

The word pixel meant "picture element", but CSS redefined it to mean something quite different (a particular subtended angle of view). This causes confusion: CSS pixels are not pixels. (Indeed, I have seen misinformed comments on Slashdot due to that confusion.)

My question is this: why call the subtended angle a "pixel", instead of something else (e.g. "subangle")? If CSS wanted to use the subtended angle for something, that is fine, but calling it a pixel seems to follow the approach of Humpty Dumpty—"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean".
Re:Where... by bcat24 · 2006-06-20 07:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

CSS 3 *is* far into the future. :) It won't be a rec. for a long time, and it won't be supported by browsers (IE, I'm looking at you) for an eon.

OK, here's my related question:

Do you think the W3C development process is too slow? I know that you guys want everything to be perfect, but it seems to take far longer than necessary. CSS 3 shows promise and I wouldn't want it to die a slow death in standardization.