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   Rachel Lee Nabors (rachelnabors@toot.cafe)'s status on Monday, 17-Jul-2023 00:30:04 JST Rachel Lee Nabors

   "perhaps it isn’t CSS itself but our unwillingness to examine our sexist ideas of what is worthy in web development"

   https://thoughtbot.com/blog/tailwind-and-the-femininity-of-css

   • Matthew Lyon repeated this.
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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Monday, 17-Jul-2023 00:30:00 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     @rachelnabors No, as a woman and software developer and someone whose front end web development experience was preceded by a lot of document layout and someone who just spent a couple evenings beating on a responsive site's CSS:

     CSS is shit. CSS is utter garbage. The WC3 should be utterly ashamed that it is associated with them.

     A far more authentically feminist take on CSS than that men hate it because design is considered "feminine" is that CSS has been allowed to suck as catastrophically as it has because it's seen as a tool for women and other lesser peoples, such as designers and frontend implementers.

     CSS is a pair of slacks with no pockets; a pair of shoes you can learn to look professional in so long as you can keep the rictus of pain off your face; the radium they'd have you paint on a watch dial.

     And the reason CSS is a suppurating wound of technology is because...

     Matthew Lyon repeated this.
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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Monday, 17-Jul-2023 00:36:11 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     @rachelnabors CSS fundamentally, on a deep epistemological level, does not match how either documents or applications are conceptualized as being structured by either their creators or their users. And it doesn't because a bunch of nerds who hadn't the faintest notion of how a document works - and who had apparently never even used a word processor - failed to recognize they were clueless amateurs deep in Dunning-Krugerland, and invented the worst possible style system.

     For them to have done otherwise would have entailed their listening to SMEs, which in this case would have been designers and specialists in design technologies. And not just listened to them: worked to their specifications.

     Which they weren't going to do.

   • Embed this notice
     Rachel Lee Nabors (rachelnabors@toot.cafe)'s status on Monday, 17-Jul-2023 03:25:17 JST Rachel Lee Nabors

     • Matthew Lyon
     • Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     @mattly @siderea

     I think it's interesting that the argument of the post is that CSS and the people who are good at it are delegitamized in the tech community is pushed to the side is lost in a sea of "I hate this; thank you for hating it, too." It is easy to hate things that are hard. But that doesn't make them less legitimate.

     Modern CSS can do so much well. But it isn't "easy." Anything solving for this many use cases while being backwards compatible is going to be a challenge!

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     ryb (ryb@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Monday, 17-Jul-2023 04:00:25 JST ryb

     • Matthew Lyon
     • Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     @mattly @rachelnabors @siderea Incorrect summary. CSS is uniquely easy to make fun of because it’s used to control page design, which, yes, is typically seen as feminine. You can argue direction of causality, but the effect is evident. And you’re doing that insufferable strawman thing with the “if you don’t absolutely love CSS”… give me a break.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 09:29:20 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     • Peter Ludemann
     • Dan :guix:

     @danielittlewood

     > Do you think the separation of content from appearance is a bad idea, or that HTML/CSS doesn't do it well, or something else?

     Several things:

     1) To a first approximation, I think the separation of content from appearance is a fine idea.

     2) Which is to say, to a second approximation, I think it's terrible: I have an inchoate intuition that content vs appearance is a bad paradigm because it is an attempt to shoehorn a triad into a false dichotomy, and the real correct solution is separation of content vs appearance vs a third thing, maybe "functionality".

     3) But that aside, and for the moment CSS aside as well, HTML's separation of content and appearance is catastrophically bad. It is predicated on fundamentally mistaken ideas as to what is content and what is not.

     I have one particular favorite hobby horse example of this, which really captures how apparently trivial errors can have far-reaching consequences.

     [Continued]
     @PeterLudemann @rachelnabors

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     Dan :guix: (danielittlewood@fosstodon.org)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 09:29:25 JST Dan :guix:

     in reply to

     • Peter Ludemann
     • Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     @siderea @PeterLudemann @rachelnabors

     What do you mean by "toxic content/appearance paradigm"? Do you think the separation of content from appearance is a bad idea, or that HTML/CSS doesn't do it well, or something else?

     I looked up your example https://fosstodon.org/@siderea@universeodon.com/110687656577995679 and while it sounds like maybe there's a feature missing (greater control over line breaking?) it sounds more like something that could be patched than "this technology is a mistake". What do you hate about it?

     Matthew Lyon repeated this.
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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 09:29:26 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     • Peter Ludemann

     @PeterLudemann

     Mu. Semantic purposes require semantic markup, appearance purposes require appearance markup, and - this is critical - if you want appearance to be contingent on semantic structure, there needs to be a way to map the two to each other, contingently.

     But CSS will always be hamstrung by HTML's toxic content/appearance paradigm.

     Want an example? Go scroll back in my timeline just a few days to my recent CSS question and the kludge I found to answer it. Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted there's any solution at all, which prior the viewport functionality, there wasn't. But my rage is unending that I am only managing to achieve a semantic purpose by expressing myself in quantities of pixels. This is Wrong, and gods will punish our whole civilization for our sinful ways.

     @rachelnabors

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     Peter Ludemann (peterludemann@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 09:29:27 JST Peter Ludemann

     in reply to

     • Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     @siderea @rachelnabors
     Wouldn't a "correct" solution have required content-based "abstract" markup, rather than appearance-based markup? As Brian Reid (who designed Scribe) observed "Most people won’t use abstract markup even if you threaten them" (slide 34 of http://www.reid.org/~brian/markup98.ppt , referenced from http://xml.coverpages.org/mt98-papers.html#reid - he gave that talk at other conferences also)

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 09:32:23 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     • Peter Ludemann

     @PeterLudemann

     > I've seen far too many apps that expose the structure of the data model, to the immense confusion of the users.

     Speaking of which: is there a *name* for that antiPattern?

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     Peter Ludemann (peterludemann@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 09:32:24 JST Peter Ludemann

     in reply to

     • Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     @siderea @rachelnabors
     In data modeling, there's often an "impedance mismatch" between the data design and the the various uses of the data, and an application needs to deal with that -- I've seen far too many apps that expose the structure of the data model, to the immense confusion of the users. No configuration language (of which CSS is an example) - which is just a fancy way of specifying parameters - is going to handle that kind of mapping between semantics and appearance. Modulating the appearance based on other constraints (such as your example of window size) is an additional mapping for which configurations will only be partially successful.