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Comment by j4pe | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me a little, and says something about Håkon's perspective, that all of his examples are newspaper pages.

This looks like the makings of a high quality spec from 2004. Granted, CSS should natively support responsive columns, but it's a solved problem. Does he really think that Figure support is what limits web from competing with native? The problem with presentation of web apps has always been that we use a language designed for describing newspaper layouts to structure a dynamic, morphing interface. And its creator wants more succinct descriptors for recreating the above-the-fold of the New York times at variable widths.

It's almost saddening when the creator of something is no longer the guy driving it forward.

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Don't be sad, doing paged layouts is quite an interesting challenge in CSS. Native apps use the routinely and newspapers is just one well-known example. See the spec for more examples. Also, the challenge here is not to replicate newspapers, but to make the content responsive on screens of all sizes.

This was exactly the reaction I had as well. It's demonstrative of someone so hopelessly stuck in the past and unable to the potential of an electronic medium. Wh we continue to anchor web technologies to print idioms is beyond me. I'm not saying there are no classically useful concepts from print. Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic style does a great job of educating one on the value and thinking of techniques from the print world. There are timeless principles that are directly transferrable to the present unchanged, but there are principles whose entire raison d'etre is tied to constraints and properties exclusive of print. Issues that are no longer necessarily applicable on the web.

We obviously have different points of view: I find that the best presentations on mobile devices often borrow more from paged designs than from scrolled designs. As such, I believe that being able to paginate content on dynamic screens is important for the future of CSS and the web.

Pages and columns have been basic building blocks in typography since the Romans started cutting scrolls into pages. This is not why browsers should support them. We should do so because they help us make better, more beautiful, user experiences on mobile devices.

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