Re: CSS priorities

On Jan 19, 2014 10:22 PM, "Jens O. Meiert" <jens@meiert.com> wrote:
>
> Tab, Working Group members, could you comment on focus and what plans
> you have with respect to curbing feature creep and spec fragmentation?
>
> I had responded with the following to Daniel’s transitions email, but
> predictably that wasn’t very useful there:
>
> […] my point here, or wish, is that it would be good to focus CSS more.

> I’ve brought this up a few times in the past but I really think we
> don’t do anyone a favor cramming, pardon a bit of judgment,
> *everything* into CSS.

I actually agree with Jens on this point as stated, but i think we are
-way- far apart on what that should mean or why.

Variables/constants are a great example: They
> should not have become part of CSS, and that not just because authors
> never optimized their CSS well enough to discover that they don’t need
> variables to fight complexity, but simply because anything like PHP
> would do for this [1].
>
That didn't actually happen.  Custom Properties is what happened - and that
matches how CSS works in simple properties and it cannot be done by other
means like preprocessors (though it can do some simple things that can be
done that way, as a result).  More still though, i'd be curious to know
where your data came from.  I'm pretty sure I have never seen a real
stylesheet that was 100 lines, long.  There is a reason that hardly anyone
doesn't use a pre-processor anymore - without some simple features it's too
difficult to manage.  The rationale that some very basic const concept
complicates CSS because everyone already does it with some other tech a
dozen different ways that depend on frameworks which require whole
additional runtimes and frameworks seems ...illogical to me.

> Complexity then is hard to quantify but I think CSS complexity has
> just exploded because anything that’s asked for and “sounds good” is
> added. I’m getting a little cynical maybe but I don’t recall any
> feature being *rejected* here for about ten years (with the exception
> of obvious nonsense). Now we have 300 properties (up from 53 in CSS 1
> [2]) and are about to make CSS a programming language.

The comparison there, to be fair is a little misleading.  CSS 1 was, well,
not very much - CSS 2 happened REALLY fast.  Put another way, we went from
0 to 53 properties really fast - then almost immediately more than doubled
the number... And there were already some things queued up then that didn't
make the cut - then it took like a decade and a half to get here.   I agree
with the basic sentiment but let's be sure to keep that part in perspective
too.

There has been an explosion of high level use-solving properties -  but i
disagree with the takeaway that Custom Properties or even constants of some
kind are good examples of what we shouldn't do.  Instead, it seems to me we
should work on what underpins and make it possible to experiment with the
high level solving outside of vendors and working groups.  It's unlikely
that our high level answers will be palatable, long sited, etc. otherwise.
It seems to me that Custom Properties is one of those tools that help us do
just that, and isn't an instance of case solving, so it seems like a good,
rather than bad example to me.

To be fair though, of the CSS 3 properties added, how difficult would it be
for you to make a list of the ones you wish we would have punted on for now?

> <snip>
>
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/People/Bos/CSS-variables
> [2] http://meiert.com/en/indices/css-properties/
>
> --
> Jens O. Meiert
> http://meiert.com/en/
>