CSS Proposed 20 Years Ago Today

An anonymous reader writes: On 10 October 1994, Opera CTO Hakon Lie posted a proposal for Cascading HTML style sheets. Now, two decades on, CSS has become one of the modern web's most important building blocks. The Opera dev blog just posted an interview with Lie about how CSS came to be, and what he thinks of it now. He says that if these standards were not made, "the web would have become a giant fax machine where pictures of text would be passed along." He also talks about competing proposals around the same time period, and mentions his biggest mistake: not producing a test suite along with the CSS1 spec. He thinks this would have gotten the early browsers to support it more quickly and more accurately. Lie also thinks CSS has a strong future: "New ideas will come along, but they will extend CSS rather than replace it. I believe that the CSS code we write today will be readable by computers 500 years from now."

Comments

Love CSS

[WaffleMonster]

While I have a laundry list of complaints I like the underlying idea more than I dislike it. Amazing how simple html content ends up being and how flexible changes become once you have made a reasonable attempt to declare content and decouple style.

This said I'm very much less certain what my sentiment of CSS actually translates to in the real world.

The underlying problem while technology wants data presentation to work across maximal number of display sizes and capabilities such things too often appear as intolerable annoyances to designers. The world is teaming with fixed width websites and crap like zen garden is a joke. Without assumptions of fixed content tailored specifically for the garden those layouts would fall apart.

It often takes different skill sets to design something that both looks cool and is able to survive with coolness intact across a number of different and perhaps unknowable parameter changes.

This in my opinion is responsible for about half of the great tables v CSS layout arguments. What designers really want is for each page to have a known width and a known height without all of the compatibility bullshit or having to think about unknowns... what they actually want looks a heck of a lot more like PDF than it does HTML/CSS.

Without significant design / technology change to bring competing interests into better alignment I wouldn't bet on CSS lasting 50 years.

The tragedy of CSS

[tigersha]

CSS is good. Really. It is not too bad, has a few warts and so, but we are finally there. Or will be in 5 years when all the browsers finally support the new Grid layout module.

The problem with CSS is that it took 25 damn years to get to the point where windowing system were already in the 90s. There are 2 main problems up to now

First, the block model. Seriously people, if I specify that a block has a width of 300 pixels I mean that the block has 300 pixels, and not the content inside the block without the padding. Really. That makes no sense. For some reason it did to the authors of the standard. It hurts me to say this, but Internet Explorer 5.5 got this right and simply ignored the stupid, dumb standard. Most of the nightare that is CSS layout was caused by this clusterfck of stupidity. Now there is finally a solution, one can set the box-sizing and almost all browsers support it. Those that do not are old and can fly.

Secondly, tables vs grid. I get the whole tag is not semantic thing. Really. But often, strangely standards people, we DO WANT THINGS TO BLOODY LINE UP IN A TABLE. But nooooo, we must not use tables because it is not fashionable or something.

Floats were meant to be used to put pictures inside a large block of text. It is great for that. Now it is used for laying out elements on a page. And this is supposed to be LESS hacky than using a table? Seriously??

CSS grid layout finally, finally, finally solves all of this hacker bull. It does something that should have been in there since the 90s. After all, pretty much any window manage on the planet could deal with this back then. People still use tables because it is easier. Grid also decouples the sequence of the elements in the markup from the sequence on the screen, which is cool. But, but even Chrome only experimentally supports grid layout so I have to wait another 5 years.

A couple of other things on my wishlist.

Calculation. Based on the current state of the screen. Sometimes saying that I want the thing should be 500px - the width of the div with id #blabla would make a lot of all the CSS shenanigans unnecessary. Yes, I know that some designers can't add, but I can and I want to. And no, I do not want mathematica in there. Simple basic arithmetic would be fine. Right now you can do 3D transform in CSS3 but you can't subtract the width of an element??!! FFS why??!!! There is a new calc module but that will take another 5 yars to become commonplace.

Better control of height. I want to say "This div fills the rest of the container vertically/horizontally" One of the reasons tables are useful for layout is that you CAN do this by setting the width of a column to *. Layout engines in GUI land, such as Interface builder and the oooold News uses a concept called Springs which expand. Coool feature, missing from CSS.

The fact that you can book loads of courses and read lots of book on how to arrange things on a page with CSS is a real shame. It simply should not be necessary to have that level of expertise just to such a trivial thing.

25 years. This is the time from the end of WW2 to the day I was born (almost precisely). 25 years is the time between the invention of the transistor and the invention of the CPU. 25 years is the time between the first flight and the first ocean crossing over the Atlantic. 25 years is the time that someone goes from being born to being a working productive adult. 26 years is the time between Columbus' discovery of the new world and Hernando Cortes conquest of the entire Aztec empire.

25 years is a quarter of a century.

25 years is the time between the invention of CSS and the moment it is viable to lay out a page without being an expert in some very arcane hackery. Why was this really necessary??!!!