Re: [css3-images] simplifying radial gradients - Lea Verou gallery

On Oct 10, 2011, at 2:54 PM, Brian Manthos <brianman@microsoft.com> wrote:

>> One of my concerns is that I would not like us to make easy things incomprehensible.
>> When I was reviewing Lea Verou's gallery, I was struck by how several of them were
>> very hard to understand what was happening, and how they could have been
>> simplified and combined with familiar background properties.
> 
> Gradients as images provides another building block alternative to url-based bitmap images.  If people choose to combine multiple of them in interesting ways, that's a good thing not a bad thing.
> 
> If it was a bad thing, then we shouldn't have introduced layered backgrounds to CSS3.

It wasn't that there were multiple gradient combined that I found difficult. I don't know where you got that idea. I've described elsewhere how the combinations of values within a single gradient could be difficult to follow.

> "I don't like the way author X writes his pages because I want to be able to read them."
> 
> Using this argument, we should remove 99% of what CSS offers.

I disagree. Simplicity and easy learnability has been a hallmark of CSS, especially compared to SVG. Most property values are pretty easy to read and comprehend, individually. I would count 'transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(...)' as an exception, more suited to machines than most human authors.

> Have you *seen* some of the compression and obfuscation that goes on in script libraries?

Yes. CSS should be easier to understand than reading an obfuscated script library. I didn't think that was controversial. 

> If you can write them in a simpler (and often less flexible) way, that's great.  But it's not a good reason to remove capabilities.
> 
> Look at the Acid test example.  They go through all kinds of gyrations to draw a smiley face.  Should we remove all the facilities that "overcomplicate" the way they choose to accomplish that task?

That uses complex combinations of multiple properties. I am talking about a single value that gets overly complex.

Received on Monday, 10 October 2011 23:03:25 UTC