Infrequently Noted

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL

In my "Standards Heresy" talk I noted pretty bluntly that CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don't build actual web apps. If the preponderance of the working group did, we'd already have useful things like behavioral CSS being turned into recommendations and not turds like CSS namespaces and CSS Print Profile. And I'm not even sure if the "Advanced" Layouts cluster-fsck should be mentioned for the fear that more people might actually look at it. You'd expect an "advanced layouts" module to give us hbox and vbox behaviors or a grid layout model or stretching...but no, the "answer" apparently is ascii art. No, I'm not making this up. It's sad commentary that you can propose this kind of dreck at the W3C and get taken seriously.

Beyond what's obviously wrong with the avenues being (inexplicably) pursued, there's a lot to read into what's not being worked on. Namely the serious and myriad problems with the basics of how CSS rules are written and applied.

Lets start from the bottom: CSS 2 should have included inheritance and variable replacement. It didn't. None of the proposed bits of CSS 3 have their wits about them enough to propose a fix of any kind.

In particular, there's no way for a new, uniquely "named" rule to "mix in" previous rules and tweak them with over-rides to fit a particular scenario. It's also not possible to build a "composite class" out of 2 existing classes. You can either split behaviors into a zillion little classes and then try to ensure that they all get applied to the right elements at the right time, or use fewer (more "semantic") classes which are selector oriented and use selective re-definition to attempt to specialize appropriately. This basic inability to factor out common rules which others may then mix in is, in a word, insane.

There's absolutely no reason why, in 2007, we shouldn't be able to write CSS like this:

.highlight {
color: red;
text-decoration: underline;
}

.updated { @importRule '.highlight'; background-color: yellow; }

.updatedByOthers { @importRule '.updated'; color: #3f5070; /* a nice dark blue */ }

As for variable replacement, the above example starts to outline why we need it. Writing themes for any non-trivial system via CSS today is a PITA. Here's how it should look:

@define hlColor red;
@define hlBgColor yellow;
@define oUpdateColor #3f5070;

.highlight { color: {hlColor}; text-decoration: underline; }

.updated { @importRule '.highlight'; background-color: {hlBgColor}; }

.updatedByOthers { @importRule '.updated'; color: {oUpdateColor}; /* a nice dark blue */ }

Now, updating this for a new "theme" is as simple as moving the color definitions to an external file and changing the location of an @import URL. All our styles remain in-tact and beyond the initial replacements (and event-driven CSS-OM replacements), the performance impact is slight. That the browser vendors have variously taken it upon themselves to expose parameterized values for things like system colors should have told them something important, but alas no.

The recent growth of CSS frameworks is starting to highlight some of the massive failures of CSS and its implementations, but it's not clear how the web development community is going to shake itself awake and start asking for more than proper ":hover" support from IE. And given the pitiful state of CSS 3, it's not clear that we should even ask the W3C for improvements anyway.

This, I think, is an open and important problem: now that the failure of the W3C is all but complete, what organization (WHAT-WG? something new?) could take on the challenge of, um, challenging the browser vendors to build the stuff we need to keep the Open Web viable? And since we can't reasonably expect IE to support things in a timely fashion, do we owe it to ourselves to start building apps for browsers that will give us what we want?

Update: I'm late to this party (as usual). Andy Budd's thoughts on a "CSS 2.2" are worth a read as is Hixie's dissection of the CSS WG's uselessness. David Baron also responds with constructive suggestions.

The Browser.Next List

Thanks to the Ajaxian's for linking my last post on the topic of what we need from IE. As I've been responding to the comments, it occured to me that it's not quite fair to poke IE in the eye when there are issues (like WYSIWYG) where we need the help of all the browser vendors to get something useful done. That in mind, here's my generic Browser.Next list of 10 issues that would give Ajax libraries a break and let app authors worry less.

It should be noted, first, that these issues are designed to be small, (relatively) easily implemented point solutions to accute problems. They are intentionally not on the scale of "add a new tag for..." some feature or "standardize and implement XBL" or even "make renderers pluggable". While those would all be good, the current pace of browser progress makes me think they're beyond the pale.

This list also tries to avoid vendor-specific issues (of which there are a pile, and many of them may be much more pressing on a per-browser basis than the below issues). Lastly, I'm also not asking for standardization of these things in short order (although it's clearly preferable). We DHTML hackers are hearty folk. We'll take whatever they give us, but we could deliver much, much better developer and end-user experiences if only the browser vendors would all give us:

So that's my list...what's on yours? What am I forgetting? And how should we organize to ask the vendors for these in a way that will really stick?

Open Komodo! Huzzah!

It's somewhat inexcusable of me to not have blogged about the release of Open Komodo.

Very few of the Web IDE vendors seem to really "get" the web, and along with the folks at Aptana and Panic, the ActiveState bunch have impressed the hell out of me with their constant support of Open Source, deep understanding of why webdev sucks, and what they can do to fix it.

It's exciting to see Komodo, one of the few editors that has ever tempted me away from vim (even if for short spells), open up and make real steps to being "The Open Web's Eclipse".

Slides from my "Standards Heresy" Talk

Above is the PDF from today's talk. I had a good (but unfortunately truncated) discussion with Aaron Gustafson afterward, and it appears that there are those on the standards advocacy front who understand that those of us who "just make it work" for a living aren't evil and want exactly the same things. Hopefully this will open up a broader discussion (although I suppose that posting something on a blog hardly counts as "discussion").

On Browser WYSIWYG

The state of in-browser WYSIWYG is somewhere between pitiful and mind-numbingly painful. Opera and Safari have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and soon all the major browsers will be at the same level of awful, more or less. This area of DHTML doesn't get much love from browser vendors in part because only the heartiest souls ever venture into these deep, shark-infested waters so there aren't many people clamoring for fixes to the underlying capabilities. Everyone sane just picks up the Dojo Editor, TinyMCE, or one of the other good editing packages that are available.

Since recently delving back into the Dojo editor for the 0.9 release I've been chewing on the problem some more, and I think the solution is fairly simple in terms of the APIs which toolkit authors should expect of browser vendors. The goals of editing generally boil down to:

The current contentEditable/designMode systems fail in the undo case because (particularly on IE) it's not possible to denote what is and isn't an "action" that the user is doing, nor can you be informed by the browser when it pickles off a new state to the undo stack. This means that the undo stack captures things which aren't changes in your editing area and may appear to be "broken" by UI feedback that you provide to users in other ways.

Further, the existing system's dependence on pseudo-magical "commands" makes nearly zero sense. Every editing component worth its salt today has to build its own ways of executing DOM manipulation and then rolling back from change sets. Browsers half-coddle editing system authors when it would be better if they just got out of the way and gave us APIs which are suited to the "build the entire UI in javascript" path which everyone already takes anyway.

Since it's not really reasonable to expect that browsers will remove contentEditable, here are my proposed APi additions to it which would allow any sane editing UI to ditch the entire command structure which can slowly fade into the background over time.

These APIs added to elements with contentEditable set will allow us to use regular-old DOM methods of manipulating user selections and adding complex content from user input without fighting for control of the undo stack or inventing our own (which has so many problems that I don't want to begin to address them). Additionally, this method of manipulation will allow toolkit authors to deliver editors which operate on the semantics of the markup more easily.

Note that we suppose the current uneven level of Range and DOM APIs will persist over time, and some things may get easier over time in conjunction with these APIs as those problems are slowly alleviated. Additionally, interaction with the global undo stack for the browser is as-yet unspecified. I'm inclined to suggest that unless the editable element has focus, undo should not affect it but my unfamiliarity with the implementation of the global undo stacks in browsers may nix that and require a broader solution. There may also need to be methods for ignoring a particular set of DOM operations (say, from event handlers) to prevent browsers from taking snapshots at bad times, but I think we can ignore that for now.

Lastly, there is probably room for an API to register interest in any undo operation and to push things onto the browser's undo stack for non-editing elements, but this API solves the problem where it is most accute today.

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