Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

If this is what I think it is (a new layout engine that runs in JavaScript, so that CSS is used just for styling, not layout), it is what I've been waiting YEARS for.

Unfortunately, the site is deafeningly silent on specifics. What browsers does it support? Is there any kind of tutorial for getting started? When would this be appropriate to use, and when not? What is performance like with rendering times, both on desktop and mobile? Window resizing? How does it handle boxes that depend on the size of their content? What about non-visible boxes, when browsers often lie because they haven't actually rendered the text to be able to tell?

If anything ever needed a comprehensive FAQ, it's this.

But this has the potential of freeing us from the horrible disaster for layout that is CSS, and giving us a sane replacement, without waiting for browsers or the W3. If it really is what it promises, and works flawlessly, I wouldn't be suprised to see it become as ubiquitous as jQuery.

Yes, yes, the site needs much more. Released only a couple weeks ago and probably needs a big fat "BETA" or something.

More language features, docs, demos, etc coming soon. Right now works down to IE11, and we will work our way further down, but once we get precompilation of a static GSS layout to raw CSS (difficult b/c must account for every possible screen size), it will be bullet proof on any crappy browser!

Could you change the site so that the front page gives a very clear idea of how my CSS (and HTML if relevant) would look different? What size JS is included? Performance considerations (and if performance is poor, why this is so cool that I won't care).

It sounds cool, but maybe overkill for what I need, but the menu items don't sound relevant to me figuring out whether this is what I want.

> ... this has the potential of freeing us from the horrible disaster for layout that is CSS, and giving us a sane replacement, without waiting for browsers or the W3.

I said this exact thing when I threw together my attempt at solving the problem a month ago[1]. (Except mine used a physics engine to simulate springs.) I am now cynical about a JS-based page layout engine approach being adopted at all. There are just too many people who, after mastering CSS, believe it is the only real, performant, and compatible way to do things.

[1] https://github.com/Jared314/physics-based-page-layout

>What browsers does it support?

They have that on the github page: https://github.com/the-gss/engine.

As for the rest, it looks like this is early days. The menu on the left does tell you at least how to get it installed and how the VFL language works. I wouldn't quite call it "tutorial" level, but it's probably enough to start hacking.

Very exciting stuff though.

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