CSS Revolution revisited
By glazou on Saturday 11 September 2010, 09:13 - CSS and style - Permalink
More than 5 years and a half ago, I was calling for a CSS revolution and listed 12 things that were in my opinion absolutely needed for the future of the Web. Let's see where we are now wrt those 12 things:
- authors need a new version of CSS
CSS3 is on track and it percolates into author stylesheets every day. It's unfortunately not a "version" but still a "level" - calc()
standardized and implemented - inline-blocks
standardized and implemented - position an element relatively to any other element
not done yet despite some interest - columns
standardized and implemented - vertically center an element w/o hack
hmmm... no, still not that simple especially for an arbitrary height of the element - flex box model
proposal on the table - scale image
backgrounds and need to apply filters to images
first part standardized and implemented, second part currently discussed - better printing
in progress - constants
not done yet - better I18N
in progress - scoped stylesheets in CSS
not done yet
Not bad, to say the least...
Comments
Ajouter à tout cela césure et justification de qualité, aka for the english reader: hyphenation and justification.
8.. "need to apply filters to images" is already implemented in Firefox on any element by referencing an SVG filter, though of course it's not standardised yet.
A bonus now is that SMIL animation works on those filters too
Isn't #6 a direct consequence of #7 ?
For me, as a web author, flexible boxes is *the* most important feature missing from CSS.
For example, having multiple columns (of text) is useless without being able to have a vertically resized flexible box to enclose them. Otherwise, on a small viewport the user will have to scroll back up to start reading the second column, etc. It defeats the purpose of columns (which is enhanced readability).
In practice, web authors have already started switching to JS to implement advanced layouts, which is a shame.
What exactly do you mean by #12? Going back to your original post, I read: «12. they need scoped stylesheets, and a part of CSS 3 Selectors.»
Well: what about the following?
* Namespaces: IIUC, they are part of the current CSS3 "draft", and allow selectors such as xul|hbox or html|button
* The @-moz-document extension to CSS (implemented in Gecko but not (yet?) a standard) which allows grouping one of more rules so that they only apply to one or more "related" URLs (useful in userContent.css but maybe of dubious use otherwise)
@Jean: Justification is a standard, namely { text-align: justify }, already in CSS2.1 (if not earlier). For hyphenation, let's take quotation as an example: the "quotes:" CSS rule defines which character-pairs are to be used and how they nest, the <q> HTML element defines where quoted strings exist in the text. I don't know what l10n hyphenation rules exist, and whether the variety is sufficient to justify similar complexity, or whether the use of Unicode (and Latin1) character U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN (where end-of-line word-breaking is permissible) is enough. Defining style rules for placing hyphens not represented in the text is not always possible, or at least not without a dictionary too bulky to be part of a style sheet itself, since in some languages (such as German) word-breaking should happen between etymologically distinct units when these exist.
@ Tony Mechelynck
Yes Tony. I know, and you're giving a good description of some problems still to solve. I just want to say that good justification can't occur without a better support for hyphenation and algorithms comparable to those used in common word processors to display text in browsers. It is not so easy because browsers have to be used in numbers of languages…
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