A layout engine and design are two entirely different concepts.
CSS has nothing to do with design. It is the tool used to implement the design and there are loads of other layout tools out there that don't have CSS's infuriating quirks. On the flip side, they usually have steep learning curves because they are strict.
For a long time, until less than a decade ago, designers knew nothing about CSS. They'd do a design in pictures and their design would be implemented by a programmer.
Some (unlucky) programmers entire job was turning PSDs into HTML and CSS.
> Some (unlucky) programmers entire job was turning PSDs into HTML and CSS.
That was my entry into programming many years ago. But I wouldn't call it unlucky - early web devs like me (we didn't really call ourselves programmers back then) had front-row seats at the beginning of a revolution, and it certainly was entertaining to watch and be part of.
> CSS has nothing to do with design
CSS works the way it does because it was created to make the kind of designs that designers wanted possible. It has everything to do with graphic design. All the web designers I knew back in the early days knew some HTML and CSS and we'd often discuss possibilities and limitations of browsers and standards, and how to work around issues. They didn't just lob PSDs over the partition to the devs - there was an active dialogue and they knew their stuff.
>They didn't just lob PSDs over the partition to the devs
You were one of the lucky ones. I worked with designers who would've done fine designing a printed flyer, but couldn't comprehend the idea of a scrolling website with dynamically-populated content (of varying lengths) being viewed at different sizes on different devices/browsers.
Their solutions were along the line of "Force the browser to be XxY resolution and limit the number of words that can be entered in this area."
> CSS works the way it does because it was created to make the kind of designs that designers wanted possible
Well, not originally. Later that became a thing, yes - but all the design that was already there at that point (circa CSS 2) remained, as did the overall approach with cascading styles.
A styling language designed for HTML5 today from scratch, accommodating modern use cases, would likely look a lot different.
I think the best illustration of this "fight" between CSS as a tool for styling "traditional" hypertekst documents, vs CSS as a tool for styling "web pages" is the fate of Adobe's CSS regions proposal - and Håkon Lie's opinion piece arguing against it:
That was when "design" lost. But now with grid and transitions, there's a "new" CSS - one that is oriented around UX for "web apps". But apps evolved from documents, mind - not from windowing toolkits like smalltalk morphs or Java swing etc.
Fwiw I really liked the idea of regions for laying out rich documents - like what you might want for epub.
I must admit I'm not that concerned about "web apps" - everyone seems to end up doing their o we n abstraction anyway, and the CSS that "falls out" isn't really sane anyway.
I just wish we decoupled apps and sites, instead of forcing it all together in a large and incoherent design. This is especially painful now that it's spilling over into the desktop world because of all the Electron apps.
It would probably be written in JS, maybe something like JSSS [1]. I remember playing with it when it came out and thinking it was very cool. Pity it never went anywhere.
If we were going to start from scratch though, we wouldn't do HTML5, we'd use some other format. JSON maybe?
> All the web designers I knew back in the early days knew some HTML and CSS and we'd often discuss possibilities and limitations of browsers and standards, and how to work around issues. They didn't just lob PSDs over the partition to the devs - there was an active dialogue and they knew their stuff.
I find this false. PSD-to-code was very common back then. There even still some designers today that only work via images/PSD.
CSS has nothing to do with design. It is the tool used to implement the design and there are loads of other layout tools out there that don't have CSS's infuriating quirks. On the flip side, they usually have steep learning curves because they are strict.
For a long time, until less than a decade ago, designers knew nothing about CSS. They'd do a design in pictures and their design would be implemented by a programmer.
Some (unlucky) programmers entire job was turning PSDs into HTML and CSS.