- From: Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:02:53 -0700
- To: Brian Manthos <brianman@microsoft.com>
- Cc: Simon Fraser <smfr@me.com>, Sylvain Galineau <sylvaing@microsoft.com>, Alan Gresley <alan@css-class.com>, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>, "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>
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