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1. Embed this notice
   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:12:58 JST Paul Cantrell

   CSS is dandy. The DOM is great. Web development is fine. This is fine.
   https://stackoverflow.com/a/77974405/239816

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:13:22 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     A bog standard modern web browser is more complex than the whole-machine state of the Apple ][+ on which I first learned to code, application, OS, ROM and all, by…what? 3 orders of magnitude? 4? 5…?

   • Embed this notice
     Ian Bicking (ianbicking@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:19:17 JST Ian Bicking

     in reply to

     @inthehands there's some unfortunate caveats there, but overall it looks like a kind of cool feature that you can define a variable and its value will propagate through an entire declarative layout system...

     Web browsers are kind of awesome and older and more adaptable than any other computing platform I can think of. Apple II had a pretty short life in comparison

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:24:45 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Ian Bicking

     @ianbicking Agreed re adaptability, and agreed re longevity.

     Also:
     - There should be an API for this specific thing
     - The implementation burden of this whole general model is massive, not all of that burden is strictly necessary to achieve said adaptability, and that burden narrows the field
     - The kinds of hidden internal dependencies this model creates are nightmarish, revive ideas about scope & arg passing that mostly died in the 50s/60s
     - The mental model is simply unmanageable

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:26:13 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Ian Bicking

     @ianbicking None of those detract from your point, which is a very good one. It is truly amazing that crap I wrote in 1999 still runs flawlessly on modern computers with no user-level installs.

     I’m just feeling cranky about the box model and its friends, that’s all.

   • Embed this notice
     Ian Bicking (ianbicking@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:32:06 JST Ian Bicking

     in reply to

     @inthehands Yeah, CSS makes me grumpy too... you can't win them all!

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:46:07 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jesse Morris

     @aubilenon Are you implying that complexity is complex?

   • Embed this notice
     Jesse Morris (aubilenon@escaperooms.social)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:46:10 JST Jesse Morris

     in reply to

     @inthehands Imagine if complexity were simple enough to describe well with a single one-dimensional metric, as hinted at by this obviously not particularly serious proposition!

   • Embed this notice
     Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified: (adamshostack@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:56:12 JST Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified:

     in reply to

     • Paul_IPv6

     @paul_ipv6 @inthehands Well, correct fractions or not, no one would ever have struggled with underfull hboxes like they have to in css

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:56:12 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Paul_IPv6
     • Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified:

     @adamshostack @paul_ipv6 Formatting was a mistake

   • Embed this notice
     Paul_IPv6 (paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:56:13 JST Paul_IPv6

     in reply to

     • Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified:

     @adamshostack @inthehands

     i'm sure if we'd just gone with LaTeX instead of HTML, it would all be fine. :D

     at least subscripts/superscripts/fractions would all display correctly.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul_IPv6 (paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:56:14 JST Paul_IPv6

     in reply to

     @inthehands

     hard to believe we turned GET/PUT/POST into the $#!tshow that is the modern web, isn't it? :)

     talk about your dancing bear...

   • Embed this notice
     Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified: (adamshostack@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 04:56:14 JST Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified:

     in reply to

     • Paul_IPv6

     @paul_ipv6 @inthehands I was thinking about Paul’s comment as I wondered why a ^ disappeared between generative2 in a post here

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 06:33:51 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Paul_IPv6
     • Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified:

     @paul_ipv6 @adamshostack I’ve found it occasionally helpful to explain to both beginner developers and non-developers that when we implement a UI, we’re not implementing •a• layout; we’re implementing an algorithm to •generate• layouts. Which is hard!

   • Embed this notice
     Paul_IPv6 (paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2024 06:33:52 JST Paul_IPv6

     in reply to

     • Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified:

     @inthehands @adamshostack

     my uncle was a professional publisher of high end art/photography books. i remember how meticulous he was with every single aspect of text/font/picture layouts. he found most text editing software on computer painful to use.

     the problem with the web is that we have two religions with irreconcilable differences. you can't have any random device with any random screen layout, size, resolution, and control exactly how a page is displayed and formatted. you get fixed display and control, or no control and any device.