Re:Languages Which Almost Became CSS
by chriswarbo on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @02:01PM
(#11995974)
I'm mostly in favour of the "principle of least power", but I think the requirements for CSS would be a good fit for something like DSSSL:
- Designers/developers will, as a general rule, always max-out the system; as long as the performance is at an acceptable level, the features and bloat will increase. If it becomes unacceptable, those features and bloat will be trimmed accordingly. Hence, no matter the underlying technology, performance will almost always hover around "barely acceptable". The difference would be how much "bang for the buck" we would get for that performance; presumably a "barely acceptable" page using CSS would be capable of more than a "barely acceptable" page using DSSSL, since DSSSL would exhaust the performance budget more quickly.
- Trying to dictate which stylistic elements can/cannot be used seems like a thankless task, since many will disagree and either come up with awkward workarounds or lobby to get their desired features included (which may or may not disrupt the coherence of the provided elements). Providing a full programming language is effectively pre-empting those workarounds, and giving the community control over the available elements (e.g. via libraries). This would lead to lots of awful code, but some good ideas would emerge and become widely adopted. Browsers might specialise their evaluators to speed up common usages, etc. Very similar to Javascript, polyfills, etc.
- CSS is, after all, "just" styling information, and is applied progressively on top of HTML. The document is still machine-readable, even if we might not be able to answer particular questions about its layout and visuals. It's conceivable that some people might, for example, obfuscate their document content, and re-assemble them using styles, e.g. to prevent crawling; that's more of a cultural/social issue than a technical one though, and that cat's already out of the bag with Javascript, single page apps, etc.
In any case, the current trend of working around CSS's limitations with Javascript is the worst of both worlds. At least we might attempt to evaluate DSSSL, to see what it might look like, whilst any attempts to evaluate Javascript will quickly run into barriers like side-effects (should we run AJAX calls? What should "alert" do? etc.)
- Designers/developers will, as a general rule, always max-out the system; as long as the performance is at an acceptable level, the features and bloat will increase. If it becomes unacceptable, those features and bloat will be trimmed accordingly. Hence, no matter the underlying technology, performance will almost always hover around "barely acceptable". The difference would be how much "bang for the buck" we would get for that performance; presumably a "barely acceptable" page using CSS would be capable of more than a "barely acceptable" page using DSSSL, since DSSSL would exhaust the performance budget more quickly.
- Trying to dictate which stylistic elements can/cannot be used seems like a thankless task, since many will disagree and either come up with awkward workarounds or lobby to get their desired features included (which may or may not disrupt the coherence of the provided elements). Providing a full programming language is effectively pre-empting those workarounds, and giving the community control over the available elements (e.g. via libraries). This would lead to lots of awful code, but some good ideas would emerge and become widely adopted. Browsers might specialise their evaluators to speed up common usages, etc. Very similar to Javascript, polyfills, etc.
- CSS is, after all, "just" styling information, and is applied progressively on top of HTML. The document is still machine-readable, even if we might not be able to answer particular questions about its layout and visuals. It's conceivable that some people might, for example, obfuscate their document content, and re-assemble them using styles, e.g. to prevent crawling; that's more of a cultural/social issue than a technical one though, and that cat's already out of the bag with Javascript, single page apps, etc.
In any case, the current trend of working around CSS's limitations with Javascript is the worst of both worlds. At least we might attempt to evaluate DSSSL, to see what it might look like, whilst any attempts to evaluate Javascript will quickly run into barriers like side-effects (should we run AJAX calls? What should "alert" do? etc.)