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CSS Selectors as Superpowers
An anonymous reader writes "Simon St. Laurent writes in praise of CSS selectors: 'After years of complaints about Cascading Style Sheets, many stemming from their deliberately declarative nature, it's time to recognize their power. For developers coming from imperative programming styles, it might seem hard to lose the ability to specify more complex logical flow. That loss, though, is discipline leading toward the ability to create vastly more flexible systems, a first step toward the pattern matching model common to functional programming.'"
CSS alongside 2 basic layers, regular code and HTML document itself, only creates additional unnecessary third layer of shit that eventually may introduce problems, as soon as someone starts playing with it
That's like saying MVC is unnecessary, and not just putting all your code in a single class/module/namespace may introduce problems. There are people that say that, but they are novices.
HTML5/CSS/JS is equivalent to MVC. The "VisualBasic" type people would tend towards trying to put everything in their HTML rather than the other way around.
Anyone who has used JQuery will know how their power exceeds the original intention
...anybody who has used jQuery will know how powerful they could have been if only browsers had implemented them completely and consistently.
Meanwhile, anybody who has used CSS will wonder what the hell the original intention was, given the arcane kludges needed to produce popular web-page layout effects easily achieved using evil tables and frames, the lack of 'constants' to set standard colours and measurements.You know there's something wrong with a standard when Microsoft's broken box-model implementation makes more sense. However, that's not the fault of the selectors.
Its as if the designers* of CSS had never looked at a web site, used a DTP package, used styles in a WP package, let alone played with a Java layout manager to get ideas about what might work and/or be useful.
(* probably unfair - I'm sure it was a mixture of committee syndrome and the notion that you can define a standard without producing a reference implementation rather than individual failings).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Things like SASS and LESS point out where the big flaws of CSS are. It's crazy we still don't have variables in 2013 by default, this has been at the top of the requested features list for what, 15 years now?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
You're crazy. CSS and HTML are completely unrelated languages and technologies. None is a hack on top of another. HTML describes the structure of a document, CSS defines how things look. It's that simple. They require a different syntax because they are used for different things. And they're both very successful at what they're trying to do. Sure there are problems, sure there are things wrong with it, but show me something perfect. There are two types of languages you know: ones everybody complains about and ones nobody uses.
I have no idea what you mean by "embedded Javascript", but Javascript is the programming language of the web. Contrary to HTML and CSS, Javascript is a "real" programming language by any definition. Without it web applications would not be possible and the web would merely be a document system. Instead its the world's largest application platform, allowing users on any device to use your applications. If you are a web developer and you think that's not exciting then maybe you should think of switching careers.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
not true, there are clear defects in the tools that almost everybody agrees on (variables), plus the browsers don't support everything even though the specs are years old.
sometimes the tools really are bad....
Think about it. It's practically worthless. We might as well be compiling CSS + HTML + JS into an interactive PDF format for all the times we actually reskin entire sites. Even mobile stuff is suspect -- I mean, yeah, I can have 10 different images to serve depending on the size of the display, and I automate that image asset generation... Then what? I make the images be CSS backgrounds? Isn't that defeating the point of separating the style from the content? Go the other way: Actually put the content wholly in the HTML, and only use CSS to style everything. Yeah, great, I can sort of reskin for printers and mobiles, but where's the detection mechanism? It's on the server side... Thus conflating the whole model, view, controller and the presentation, content, style, etc. I mean, JS to manipulate the view -- So, what, a segmented controller? CSS3 Animation instead? Oh, so that's a style thing now. Bah, whatever. A rose by any other name...
The problem is that designers would love to think these problems can be isolated and are separable. The reality is that they are not. Concentrating on making your CSS super flexible with selectors is merely mental masturbation. If it weren't then folks would be making CSS libraries for pulling off common styles and effects. Go to the "poster child" of CSS: CSS Zen Garden, and see for yourself. Tons of #id tags, tons of different designs, no one really taking any two designs and combining them with ease...
The reality of the situation is that the next person who comes along will just scrap the whole thing and re-make the design again anyway (yes, even if that person is you). Might as well be compiling it all down into a low level colored shape display system, that way we can implement CSS and HTML and even new markups atop it, instead of waiting for OVER HALF the age of the web just to move from HTML4.01 to HTML5...
CSS is great when used properly (although, somewhat hereticly, I would kill for definable constants a-la 'color: PRIMARY_WEBSITE_COLOR;' without resorting to dynamically writing the CSS ).
Unfortunately graphic (website) designers are completely shit at using it. Even simply understanding when they should use an ID and when they should use a class seems to a'splode their brain, "huh, what is wrong with using this same id a bajillion times in the page". Don't even try telling them that "redtext" is not a good classname. Heck half of the time it's ".span1"!
They don't even know (even after telling them half the time) that you can use multiple classes on a single element, let alone combine selectors, everything is a single ID or classname to them. The amount of copy-paste in most web designer's stylesheets is simply offensive, all because their brains don't allow them to modularise their desires into useful reusable CSS classes. Cascade? Inheritance? These are foreign words to the average website designer.
There is no point telling a designer how they should can make their CSS better, they just won't understand. Worse, if the programmer, who does know how to use CSS as it was intended, attempts to fix their stylesheets (or worse, cut up their photoshops into proper HTML and CSS), the original designer just won't understand how to do anything in the stylesheet anymore.
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First, you lose credibility for linking w3schools.com. Professional web developers wouldn't be caught dead referencing them. Second, you're referencing a tag that's deprecated because of CSS. Professional web developers wouldn't be caught dead using a font tag (or any other stylistic tags for that matter).
I always liked PHP, but I'm an infrastructure guy who only uses PHP for relatively minor stuff. Something doesn't need to be perfect to be useful.
Please don't burn me, I don't weigh the same as a duck...