Re: !important: css versioning, and a semantic shift

Hello Florian,

On Tue, 16 Jan 2018 09:29:35 +0900
Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:
> 
> Things along this line have been suggested and considered multiple
> times over the years, but ultimately rejected, as that would not work.

I totally disagree!

> Any page without "@css: 3;" will be interpreted as css21. But
> initially, so will any page that has "@css: 3", because browsers that
> don't know about it (currently all of them) will just drop this line,
> an render the page as usual, and so even browsers who would want to
> use special css3 semantics would have to render it using css21 rules,
> otherwise the pages would work differently in different browsers,
> which would be terrible.

Hmm... I come from browser-war times and know what you mean! I also
survived css1 lack of clarity. Internet survived! But there is a deeper
misunderstanding in your saying...

> We could instead have @css3 { ...put your stylesheet here... }, as
> that would be ignored by old browsers, but even then every (new)
> browser would have to support both the old way and the new way
> forever, which is quite costly. For authors, it would be costly as
> well, as they would have to write their stylesheet twice: once using
> @css3{} for new browsers and once without it for old ones.

They won't! They'd stick to prepared scripts, ready-made scripts from
the net (think of normalization scripts), tools, languages like sass or
lesscss, more javascript etc. Also, much of the changes is convertible
automatically relatively easily. And those tools would be available...

> Even though everybody recognizes that some decisions made in the past
> are not ideal (see here[1] for example), and that this causes some
> pain, the pain is not nearly enough to justify making everybody do
> twice the work.

They'll do so or so when they start using css3 because they
neccessarily need to serve fallbacks. See all the hacks already
provided in blogs and wikis. There are so many cascading tricks to not
step into the mess. Look around! The mess is already there! The css3
mess would step out of this over time! That is a chance! Don't keep
people in the mess because of the fear of mess!

> For all its quirks, the fact that new web pages can work in old
> browsers (with some graceful degradation) and old web pages work in
> new browsers is a huge strength of the web, even if it does have the
> downside that we have to live with the mistakes of the past.

You do so as if this would work just so!

> —Florian
> 
> [1] https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes
> 
> 

Regards,
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dennis Heuer
einz@verschwendbare-verweise.seinswende.de

Received on Tuesday, 16 January 2018 02:10:15 UTC