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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.'"
What box model would be best?
Serious question. I'm doing a specialist graphics app at the moment, and I was just considering this the other day. What's the important rect for a box?
Most graphics app use a rect that is halfway through the border by default, as a result of the concept of "stroking" the rect. CSS is very different, and as you say a bit broken, by default using outside the margin for position, and content rect for size. So there's no concrete rect for layout of a box at all in CSS. And then there's box-sizing, which could allow the concept using the same rect for positioning and size, but doesn't.
How would a designer prefer to think of the primary metrics of a box, for the sake of alignment, snap to grid, proportional resizing etc?
1) Margin rect
2) Outside border
3) Centre of border
4) Inside border (outside padding)
5) Around the content (inside padding).
Of course, "all of them" and "it depends" are rational answers. But not much use when deciding on default or standard behaviour.
And now your web server has to do PHP processing on every page and every style sheet, so your load goes up. So you implement some caching. Now you have two problems.