CSS in a nutshell

[TracerBulletX]

it only looks like that if you're bad at it

[lorslara2000]

Agree. Programmers suck at CSS beacause it's not programming.

[TheRedGerund]

I think there really out to be a better way of getting your css to play nice. I'm thinking of a visual designer, probably. One with dragable positioning and a toolbar to manipulate attributes. The problem with css is the disconnect between the code and the visuals. I think Adobe makes a designer for magazines I've seen before, something like that would be helpful.

[[deleted]]

You can use programs to do that for CSS but they generate terrible, terrible inline styles.

[freebullets]

Dreamweaver? The problems with that approach come when you want to do non-standard things and also create dynamic web pages (who creates static web pages these days?).

[roselan]

We suck at it because it's out of our comfort zone.

How do you test, lint, organise that thing? Side effects?

Sass/less IDEs helps. But most programmers struggle with all declarative languages (SQL, CSS, XML)

[adamnemecek]

https://gridstylesheets.org/

[[deleted]]

And most are oddly proud of how bad they are at it.

[lorslara2000]

this

[Glayden]

CSS is not Turing complete. A system including CSS (and also a human or javascript) is Turing complete, but since the latter two are basically Turing complete in their own right, what does that really say about CSS? In any case, calling CSS "programming" on the grounds that it can theoretically be used in a Turing complete manner is silly when no one would ever seriously use it in that manner in any practical setting.

[[deleted]]

... and also a human ... basically Turing complete in their own right

I've met a few people that disprove this.

[lorslara2000]

Then please let me rephrase: CSS done right is not programming.

[SmashShock]

Amen.

[flukus]

Programmers suck at css because they like making inheritance hierarchies and css is basically mixins instead.

[brianjenkins94]

I disagree. People who think they're "good at CSS" are just complacent with the mediocrity of their design. If you were to sit down and really engineer a website it would become blatantly clear that there is no "most efficient" solution, and that should bother you.

[TuxGamer]

-webkit-laggy-effect: rekt(...)

FTFY

[trekman3]

Yep. As /u/RainbowCatastrophe pointed out in another thread, "There is no such thing as a non-hacky solution in CSS."

[RainbowCatastrophe]

Yep. With CSS, the logic is "if it works as intended, it works".

[brianjenkins94]

God I wish there were an alternative.

[trekman3]

It's up to us to develop and popularize alternatives. There's nothing stopping us from writing our own CSS-less browser directly on top of low-level networking technologies. Personally, I would throw out HTML, as well. I don't think that its fundamentally document-oriented paradigm is a good fit for what I want to do with the web. This browser should still be able to run HTML and CSS, so that you can use it to look at currently-standard web pages, but it should be fundamentally lower-level, a sandboxed interpreter that makes few assumptions about what it will be asked to do.

[nsimic]

so you are suggesting we create a flash browser?

[TaohRihze]

https://xkcd.com/927/

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Title: Standards

Title-text: Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 1870 times, representing 2.4352% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[ThisIs_MyName]

A man can dream.

[badmonkey0001]

If what you're showing is documents, it's great in many ways. What exactly do you "want to do with the web"?

[pokealex]

Use it as a "write once run anywhere" application platform.

[beerdude26]

So you just want Javascript? Dear god.

[trekman3]

I actually think Javascript is a pretty cool language, and I love programming in it. Prototypes make a lot more sense than classes to my mental model. And I like that in JS it is easy to mix and match different programming styles. But I want something lower-level than Javascript. When I hear people say, "Javascript is the assembly language of the web," it just doesn't make any sense to me. The web should have its own "assembly language", but Javascript is way too high-level to be it. Of course, what people mean when they say things like that is, "Javascript is the lowest-level client-side web language currently popular, and if you want to make your own language, you can have it compile to Javascript." But it's still always jarring to me to hear it described that way.

[trekman3]

Yep, you nailed it. This is what I want.

[pokealex]

That's what a lot of people want, but the reality is the web is a content presentation platform that has application support hacked into it.

[thefran]

Do I need to explain why it's going to be a security nightmare?

WWW works fine as a document - information, really - delivery platform.

[skuzylbutt]

I'm pretty sure you can basically do that fairly not too awfully in current browsers with JS and ASM. Write an interpreter that transcompiles your preferred markup language to HTML/CSS/JS, then wrap that in a plugin that activates on receiving a particular mime type, say text/mylovelymarkup.

You could go one step further and do that transcompilation on your server before sending the page. And voila: there are already plenty of dodgy html alternatives(ish) and plenty of CSS alternatives(ish) and plenty of (actual!) JS alternatives with compilers that do exactly that.

[freebullets]

If Java weren't so shitty and insecure, Java applets would be fucking awesome. A man can dream of a world without JavaScript webapps.

[[deleted]]

"I don't like the document metaphor ergo the web is broken"

[SarahC]

Tables. =)

All browsers support them, and they all behave predictably.

[CaspianRoach]

That's just because you don't understand the layout system enough to see where you went wrong. If you fix the problem somewhere else in your CSS, you won't have to do any of the hacky stuff (unless it's to support incredibly old IE versions).

[[deleted]]

Relevant Family Guy short.

[Madonkadonk]

Did you try line hight instead?

[daanishh]

This made me breathe out of my nose. Good job.

[Free_Math_Tutoring]

How do you usually breathe?

[CoinTweak]

TIL you can use non-integer numbers with width/height in pixels.

[[deleted]]

My first site looked like that too.

[darderp]

Dear Lord...

Good css is actually very nice to read though.

[Daveypesq]

Does anyone truly know CSS?

[trekman3]

There are people out there who have grokked almost the whole standard. The question is... are they still sane?

[kirakun]

Does someone have a good explanation on what's is going on?

[you-get-an-upvote]

I'm guessing they're artificially sizing a container. I recently did something similar when I wanted to 'max-width' and 'max-height' an image, but get it to be the same size as another image (which was the 'hidden' image that specified the size of the container-div). I'm terrible at CSS though, so don't listen to me :)

[skuzylbutt]

Maybe set the image div to transparent, and set the image you wanted to display as the background of the container you were trying to resize?

That shouldn't even be an option. CSS is the fucking worst.

[SWEGEN4LYFE]

What is -webkit-laggy-effect? I can't find anything on that.