log

April 10, 2008

CSS snippets

First off, lol.

Nice epi­taph for CSS Eleven, an emp­ty web page that made a lot of buzz but con­tributed zilch to CSS, a stan­dard from the W3C where all is about vol­un­teer work, in more than six months.

Sec­ond­ly, it’s worth men­tion­ing this arti­cle on CSS3.info. Read the vari­ables spec at least — it’s short (so far), sim­ple and solves a long­stand­ing prob­lem. Apple’s three specs are more involved. It’s the trans­forms I’m most excit­ed by; Ani­ma­tions and Tran­si­tions are declar­a­tive sub­sets of JS DOM manip­u­la­tion, and like Peter Gasston I have reser­va­tions. In my mind it comes down to whether the 80/20 rule is being served (cov­er­ing sig­nif­i­cant use-cas­es) and whether keyframe data con­sti­tutes pol­lut­ing style sheets. I def­i­nite­ly feel that keyframe data does­n’t belong in CSS.

I like to be prac­ti­cal how­ev­er, and in this sit­u­a­tion CSS is a con­ve­nient, exten­si­ble deliv­ery mech­a­nism with estab­lished pars­ing and fall­back rules wide­ly imple­ment­ed. Of course this means the spec has a greater chance of imple­men­ta­tion than a com­plete­ly new pro­pos­al for Cas­cad­ing Ani­ma­tion Sheets with new pars­ing rules. We have to weigh the val­ue of CSS puri­ty vs hav­ing a work­able alter­na­tive to the “tra­di­tion­al” ani­ma­tion options such as Flash. JS ani­ma­tion is a niche, does­n’t fit to the devel­op­er audi­ence and the tools just aren’t there. Anoth­er five year wait for a sim­ple ani­ma­tion sys­tem could pret­ty much kill any chance of adop­tion later.

On the oth­er hand, I don’t think any­one involved in the ini­tial SVG spec imag­ined it’d ever include raw sockets.