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Comment by gcv | Hacker News Reader

CSS is not great for its original use case. It was poorly designed by a group of people who chose to ignore existing understanding of layout models. The TeX boxes+glue model, had it been adapted for CSS, would have made all the absurdities and nasty layout workarounds of the last 20 years unnecessary.

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I like to point to the failure of keeping table headers visible at the top of a page as you scroll down a table. If I had a book where a table spanned multiple pages and the header row wasn't included at the top of the page, I would throw the book out.

A scrollable table with fixed headers is something that Visual Basic supported in 1997.

Unsurprisingly people have been trying to get browsers to support for that for years and years e.g. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2002May/0153.h...

Of course it wasn't a use case of interest to the mighty browser vendor cabal so it has never been considered a priority. It does seem like it will be possible soon though with position:sticky https://air.mozilla.org/intern-presentation-ford/

We should probably prepare some sacrifice to the browser vendor gods to thank them for this small morsel they have thrown us.

Position:sticky will fix that once it's supported in a critical mass of browsers.

And it only took a decade or two!

Please read Håkon Wium Lie's PhD thesis http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/ to understand the reasoning behind the development of CSS. I think it was going in the right direction, although the ride got bumpy when committees and commercial interests started getting involved. Its major objective was to achieve separation of content from presentation which it achieved and I think you being unfair in your statement about CSS not being great for its original use case.

CSS did borrow concepts from TeX at the time. I agree with you that if it had borrowed more from TeX maybe we would have avoided Javascript and also we would have benefited from an updated model for TeX and I said so at http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/6463/963.

Maybe is time to revisit and revamp both.

> Its major objective was to achieve separation of content from presentation which it achieved and I think you being unfair in your statement about CSS not being great for its original use case.

I have never seen this fully implemented except in the simplest of blog-engine layouts and toy examples. There is always some pollution of the markup, at the very least in the form of the ordering of elements.

A template-based approach would've provided the same semantics a lot sooner than a decade of half-baked CSS hacks.

> It was poorly designed by a group of people who chose to ignore existing understanding of layout models.

Can you please elaborate how tables were the understanding of layout models 15 years ago?

The web was not thought to be interactive at that era, but to be printed, it's not the fault of the old specs that the web progressed significantly fast.

Who said the web was designed to be printed?

(1) The "H" in HTML stands for hypertext. (2) When has a web page ever printed well?

But there was no client side language to do anything with it.

Who said the web was designed to be printed?

I said the web was tought to be printed, all the effort of CSS (circa 98) was about styling the web in a way that made sense for print, not for interaction.

I said nothing about tables. I specifically referred to the TeX boxes+glue model.

In addition, if the web was truly meant to be printed — an assertion I have never heard before; it sounds blatantly false — then not adopting the massively successful TeX system sounds even more insane.

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