CSS and structure

> Orion Adrian wrote:
>> Actually, I've found that the lack of structure has made CSS much 
>> harder to write. I equate this to writing VBA stuff for MS Word. 
>> Rather than have multiple methods taking the different types of 
>> parameters, it had one method that would handle all contingencies and 
>> the user had to look up the method every time to see what parameters 
>> had to be set when in what situations. It's truly a nightmare.
>>
>> This is how I feel when trying to code for CSS. I can never remember 
>> what properties are available when. It's also not helpful that the CSS 
>> documentation is not presented in such a way as to make this easy to 
>> remember.

CSS is not a programming language, nor will it ever be. CSS requires 
pattern-based thinking as opposed to traditional procedural programming, 
but this is desired. The same applies for XSLT.

 >> CSS 2 has a fairly simple, yet incosistent grammar, and unfortunately
 >> its lack of structure makes it hard to code (i.e. language structure
 >> only exists to help people memorize it, as structure helps
 >> memorization and comprehension).
 >>
 >> Perhaps we need to start looking at introducing more structure into
 >> CSS and revise the syntax, be it another language or not.

Introducing more structure would only serve to complicate the language. 
When need be to have more elaborate syntax using a preprocessor is a 
good idea. CSS should not be laiden with syntactic sugar more than is 
absolutely necessary.

.max

-- 
Max Romantschuk
http://max.nma.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 29 June 2004 02:02:52 UTC