g3
Eric A. MeyerI saw yet another “CSS is a massively bloated mess” whine and I’m like. My dude. My brother in Chromium. It is trying as hard as it can to express the totality of visual presentation and layout design and typography and animation and digital interactivity and a few other things in a human-readable text format. It’s not bloated, it’s fantastically ambitious. Its reach is greater than most of us can hope to grasp. Put some *respect* on its *name*.
Nathan Knowler@Meyerweb “My brother in Chromium” 😂
sounddrill 
Zach Leatherman@Meyerweb *MY COMRADE IN CHROMIUM*
Stephen@subtl I do miss those and hope they’ll come back. But WOW is that a hard problem to solve in a markup environment. Could be that the way anchor positioning is solved will point the way…
@Meyerweb I spent some time publishing info with XSLT:FO.
I wish one could arrange content in columns that are the height of the screen so you can:
* use the entire window for content, not a thin column down the middle;
* not have to scroll up and down if the columns are taller and;
* not have the column of text so wide it's uncomfortable to read.
Do you remember a newspaper that was online in the early 00s that arranged content in columns and scrolled sideways? I think it had "Christian" in the name? International Christian something?
ARGVMI~1.PIFYou'd want to use the `columns` property for that. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Properties/columns
I'm not sure how to size the element to make it expand horizontally, though. I'm on a phone so I can't check right now, but this may or may not work:
columns: auto 80ch;
width: max-content;
height: 100%;
Roma Komarov@subtl @Meyerweb Sounds like the https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2923, which was resolved to have in CSS, and there is currently a prototype of it (column-height property, which you could use viewport units for, of course) in Chrome Canary.
[css-multicol] Overflow in the block direction for continuous media · Issue #2923 · w3c/csswg-drafts
In multicol 1, overflow in continuous media happens in the inline direction, therefore if we restrict a multicol container by height and the content of that container creates more columns than will...
ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIESbody {
snark: maximum;
}
Andrew Douglass@Meyerweb I’m guessing their solution is something like Tailwind or CSS-in-JS too.
Josh “Yoshi” Vickerson@Meyerweb in my experience the only people complaining about CSS have never bothered to actually attempt to understand it
MikeStok
Nol Malone ☭@MikeStok who am I to impose limitations on you?
jonny (good kind)@Meyerweb
How do you not look upon CSS and weep at its majesty
How do you not look upon CSS and weep at its majesty
Dawn Ahukanna
SnoopJ
Glyph@SnoopJ @jonny @Meyerweb experiencing the bad old days definitely helps, but the fundamental thing is "do you understand the problem domain". I am frequently annoyed by CSS due to its *inherent* complexity, but I don't just remember Netscape Navigator 3, I remember FrameMaker. I remember Quartz Xpress. Even if you've seen other *good* solutions, CSS is still kind of a miracle, and anyone who thinks it's "bloated" just doesn't appreciate the complexity of the challenge it is addressing.
@glyph @jonny @Meyerweb yea very possible that this is the real issue, and personal experience with that complexity is just a correlate for appreciating how IMPOSSIBLE it seems to come up with tools to solve the general problem at all, let alone well enough that someone would call that solution "good" or "great"
Cassandra is only carbon now@SnoopJ @glyph @jonny @Meyerweb I mean, this happens a lot, though? Sure, a bunch of things in tech are bloated, but also I've been poking around the Unicode specs a fair bit lately and every single weird thing is followed by an example of an actual, real, human language that needs that weird thing in order to work.
@SnoopJ @glyph @jonny @Meyerweb I had no idea that Finnish sometimes uses colons as a letter when transliterating loan words! Splitting strings on colons is a fantastically bad idea when working in Finnish locales! That's complicated, but then again *so is human language*.
Anyway, all by way of agreement with the broader point about CSS. Really my only wish was that it was easier to center shit.
Magnus Ahltorp@xgranade Swedish uses colons in a similar way to apostrophes in English, but much less frequently, so it would be bad in Swedish locales as well.
And it’s not only human language that is complex (something I know a bit about as a linguist), but also typographic conventions (something I know a bit about as a typographer).
Which brings us back to CSS, and while there are many frustrating things in CSS when working with many languages, it’s still better than almost anything else I’ve used.
Ben Berry@xgranade @SnoopJ @glyph @jonny @Meyerweb my (limited) understanding is that the colon in Finnish is for attaching endings to basically any word-shaped thing that isn't spelled out - numbers (1:n), initialisms (TV:sta), and letters - not for transliteration.
Also fun fact: German often uses colons in gendered words to make more inclusive language, e.g, Lehrer:innen to represent Lehrer (male teachers) and Lehrerinnen (female teachers). The good news is that this is far from settled, so * and _ are also often used 🎉
On that note, can we please have a CSS layout engine for typesetting books? With page-numbered cross references? That'd be great.
People keep making dedicated typesetting software like TeX and Typst, but this all has a rather serious problem: any book these days needs to have a web and/or EPUB version, and the author doesn't have full control over its appearance if it's translated from a print typesetting language. But if it's HTML/CSS first, no problem.
@argv_minus_one @glyph @SnoopJ @Meyerweb
you may like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Paged_media
with an example for a table of contents that links to page numbers here - https://www.michaelperrin.fr/blog/2019/11/printing-the-web-part-2-html-and-css-for-printing-books
you may like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Paged_media
with an example for a table of contents that links to page numbers here - https://www.michaelperrin.fr/blog/2019/11/printing-the-web-part-2-html-and-css-for-printing-books
CSS paged media - CSS | MDN
The CSS paged media module defines the properties that control the presentation of content for print or any other media that splits content into discrete pages. It allows you to set page breaks, control printable areas, and style left and right pages differently.
@jonny @argv_minus_one @SnoopJ @Meyerweb ooh. I was vaguely aware that this existed and I was going to say something to that effect, but this specific link is much better, thank you!
Aslak Raanes@glyph @jonny @argv_minus_one @SnoopJ @Meyerweb The are tools like Prince https://www.princexml.com/books/
Florens Verschelde@argv_minus_one @jonny @aslakr @glyph You asked if you could have it, not if you could have it for free ^^
There are more tools, many commercial, listed here:
https://www.print-css.rocks/tools
For a FOSS solution, WeasyPrint is interesting, but is more limited than Prince/PDFReactor/AntennaHouse.
https://weasyprint.org/
bogosity
Rachael L
d@nny disc@ mc²@Meyerweb too bad the w3c is a google production which makes it impossible for users to provide any input on the format. is there a reason it needs to be human-readable without any form of intermediate representation? is there a reason it must support the entire universe of interactivity along with layout? part of the reason browsers are sites of monopolistic coercion is the lack of ability to break down these burgeoning standards into component parts. there's no alternative to CSS because it has swallowed up the alternatives.
Ollie Boermans@hipsterelectron
Can you expand or give examples of an intermediate representation? Not sure what you mean.
@Meyerweb
Can you expand or give examples of an intermediate representation? Not sure what you mean.
@Meyerweb
@hipsterelectron @Meyerweb It needs to be human readable because humans need to read it.
Susanna the Artist 🌻@Meyerweb People who had to develop websites before CSS existed understand.
Bruce Heerssen 
Perhaps some people need to be reminded of IE's box model.
Suzanne Aldrich (she/her)
Ray McCarthy@superflippy @Meyerweb
Compare Mobi ebooks (HTML3) with epub2 ebooks (subset of XHTML HTML5 & CSS3). The epub2 is elegant, and while it can't duplicate paper from PDF, the insides of PDF is horrible and doesn't reflow, but epub2 working from 2.4" to 32" screen & 50 dpi to 300 dpi.
Some people are clueless about CSS. Maybe they use wordprocessors as typewriters?
Maybe designers of InDesign, as LO Writer ODT ->docx ->Calibre -> epub2 gives 1:1 styles to CSS.
lick here for more info@Meyerweb frankly, I haven't seen a single layout system that comes even close to CSS in at least versatility or reliable defaults, let alone both.
Even imitations like QML break apart on most trivial things.
Paul_IPv6
kat@Meyerweb they do know they are complaining about the spectral variability that is “humans” in the “Human Computer Interface (HCI)”?
@dahukanna RIGHT?!?!?
Russell Garner@dahukanna @Meyerweb HCI <puffs pipe> now there's a name I haven't heard in a loooong time...
Mx. Alba 
@Meyerweb
I do have to say though... In the olden days I used to make websites in vim in plain html back when frames were the new and hot thing... Kept up until php, xhtml and the first iterations of css... And then it all just got way too complicated. When I now glance at a website's source code I usually haven't the foggiest about what's going on. Most of the web code out there isn't human readable anymore and that's a damn shame.
I do have to say though... In the olden days I used to make websites in vim in plain html back when frames were the new and hot thing... Kept up until php, xhtml and the first iterations of css... And then it all just got way too complicated. When I now glance at a website's source code I usually haven't the foggiest about what's going on. Most of the web code out there isn't human readable anymore and that's a damn shame.
Stephen Farrugia@Meyerweb one day it will be so big that it won't be cornered as a "specialty" skill any more
@Meyerweb Some problems are just hard. It does no one no good to pretend they aren’t.
Those same people then whine about complex test setups behind seemingly simple problems.
raphaelThis goal is admirable, but it also seems unachievable.
I wonder if it would've been better to just let web pages supply their own layout code and shaders. It'd slow down page loading, but it would also make browsers much smaller and simpler while removing the limits on what web designers can do.
@argv_minus_one If that is what you think CSS is for, you have fundamentally misunderstood it.
Perhaps I have. Could you elaborate?
@argv_minus_one One ord elaboration: accessibility