Re: A wish for 2014: page transitions

Respectfully, I'd like to express the exact opposite wish to Jens.

CSS exposes no more complexity than you will find within equivalent APIs 
for painting, layout, widget styling, typography, etc. within a native 
platform. I don't understand why people accept new JavaScript language 
features and APIs to extend the capabilities of the web platform, but 
still seem wedded to a 1999 view of CSS as a monolithic thing that has 
to be considered and grasped as a whole, whose only legitimate use-case 
is styling.

CSS *is* a programming language, with a declarative rather than 
imperative syntax, that is used to expose disparate presentational APIs. 
Its purpose within the platform has evolved, but its feature set is 
still retarded by this anachronistic mindset, and it's absolutely 
poisonous to the competitive parity of the web. What's hard about CSS 
isn't complicated new features, it's configuring pre-processor workflows 
to get a decent syntax, and hacking "simple" features like floats to get 
layout capabilities that other platforms ship with in version 1.0, but 
which CSS still hasn't finished after seventeen years.

I want page transitions in CSS in 2014. I also want variables, macros, 
nesting, mixins and decorators. I want the language to empower 
developers, not sacrifice power and productivity at the altar of some 
idealised goal of simplicity.

Thanks,
Jon

Received on Monday, 13 January 2014 18:02:25 UTC