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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

'display' is way too overloaded. block/inline-block/inline are fine, defining how other elements stack against this element. Visibility should not be included though - display:none; should instead be visible: true|false. Then the layouts are shoved inside this property too: grid, flex, table. There should instead be a layout: grid|flex|table

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There is a difference between dispaly and visible in CSS. One just hides the element but doesn't rearrange the other elements around it, the other display as if the element doesn't exist.

https://www.tutorialrepublic.com/css-tutorial/css-visibility...

I just learned something today, and I do CSS (amongst other things) for a living. Maybe it should be visible: true|false|ghost

Seriously, never had to deal with visibility:hidden before? To quote the Pythons: You lucky, lucky bastard....

It’s kind of unusual to set visibility to hidden in CSS, it’s more something you’d code in jQuery, or handle in the React code itself.

If you've never before seen this hack consider yourself privileged to been born in a better world, without IE6 :P

.clearfix:after {

  visibility: hidden;

  display: block;

  font-size: 0;

  content: " ";

  clear: both;

  height: 0;

}

In addition, visibility may participate in animations. In particular we can delay the transition of visibility to false, but not of display to hidden. So it is very helpful in some pure-CSS disappearance animations, such as fading out a modal's background overlay.

To make matters worse, the "visibility" property exists, with values "visible", "hidden", and "collapse".

"collapse" works kind of like display: none, but ... not in all contexts.

CSS Display Module Level 3 sort of takes this criticism on board and has a more compositional approach to display. It's still one property but the attribute is multi-valued. c.f. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/10/the-two-value-syntax-of-th.... However browser support is very limited, it's not yet in Chrome or Safari, and whether this goes far enough is a matter of taste.

I would go far as to say it's obfuscation. But I don't think the CSS people feel the same. At this point I've chalked it up to a difference in philosophy and ideology.

Brevity, explicitness, obviousness, conciseness, and symmetry all contribute to the simplicity and order of a language, which minimizes the learning curve and maximizes ease of utility.

If that were the goal, there are tons of things that could and would have been done differently.

Most lists such as that of the OP and most criticism of CSS I find to be about users from a user standpoint criticising something about CSS that is either obfuscating or obstructive to their experience and productivity.

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