CSS Turns 10 Years Old 176
An anonymous reader writes "Cascading Style Sheets celebrate their tenth anniversary this week. The W3C put together the CSS10 site in recognition of this milestone with a Hall of Fame, essays from the past decade, a gallery, and more." I was glad to see the CSS Zen Garden selected for the Hall of Fame, and disappointed (but not surprised) that no browser on my computer correctly renders the Acid2 test.
It just works! (Score:2, Informative)
You're clearly not using a mac [slashdot.org].
Re:ACID2 Compliance (Score:4, Informative)
Heck, chances are Opera [opera.com] will run on his current computer.
Isn't it interesting, though, that most of the Acid2-compliant browsers are either Mac or Unix-based? I suppose that has to do with the fact that most Windows-only browsers just embed the IE rendering engine, and most cross-platform browsers use Gecko (here's to Gecko 1.9 passing Acid2 when it's finished!). That basically leaves KHTML and Webkit, which are firmly entrenched in *nix and MacOS respectively, and a couple of independent engines: Opera (cross-platform) and iCab (Mac).
Re:10 years (Score:3, Informative)
i dont remember the specifics of it, but i ran into this problem last year trying to set height=100% on a table. when it didnt work, i hunted down the reason: apparently, proper HTML has never had height=100% as a valid value for a table. the w3c explained that tables were never meant to be used for layout, but only for displaying tabular data.
Re:Safari has done Acid2 for more than a year! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:10 years old... (Score:5, Informative)
Correct. Honestly, I don't really ever want to see an -actively pushed-, and considered "standard" specification proposition go out without a reference implementation. Sit down, agree to a specification, propose it, then make a reference implementation, THEN start pushing it.
When you look at most successful specs, from videocard chipsets, to Java specifications, they come with a reference implementation: this makes sure that everything makes sense in -practice-, not just in theory. With CSS, it is all about theory, without real world tests.
The only reason it got pushed as standard, is because the web evolved too fast for its own good, and no one realised what was happening before it was too late, to propose an alternative to CSS.
Re:ACID2 Compliance (Score:1, Informative)
You'll find the first non-KDE port of KHTML was to AtheOS, now Syllable [syllable.org].
Re:Uh oh (Score:4, Informative)
The W3C's CSS validator has recently been changed to check against CSS 2.1 by default instead of CSS 2. The text-shadow property was removed from CSS 2.1 because virtually no browser developers bothered to implement it. The stylesheet is still a valid CSS 2 stylesheet, but you wouldn't know that because nobody's bothered to come up with a way of labelling stylesheets to denote what level of CSS they are meant to conform to.
Re:10 years (Score:4, Informative)
Really? Only HTML and CSS? No table and no javascript messing around rewriting the document?
In what way is table not HTML?
One post of almost pure jibberish... (Score:3, Informative)
No.
No.
No it doesn't, it's clear already.
"Relying on the preceding line"? It does no such thing.
"Well relative to what" - simple answer - the closest parent element / DOM node with absolute position.
If no elements have had position:absolute explictly declared, the overall canvas (body element) is assumed instead.
The fact you see both doesnt (necessarily) mean they "can't make up their own minds", it means they (we) know there is a time when either might be best, and use them accordingly.
It depends. Is the padding on the element something which should grow and shrink with user text resizing, or is the element something which is of a fixed pixel size, (eg) something designed as 'chrome' like a rounded corner or combination of background images which have to line up pixel accurately to maintain the illusion of the overall interface.
Something like line-height is better specified in ems, since you want it to remain proportionate to text size. Arguably, something like column width is too. Although this a grey area of compromise between demands of the client, purism of the designer, legal requirements of accessibility, practical requirements of browser support, etc. Hence, using both depending on where the compromise line is made.
See above; your impression is simplistic, sometimes pixels are used, other times ems are a more appropriate unit (to create liquid layouts which can adapt to user text resizing - which people may set to remain comfortable reading on small/huge monitors, if they have vision impairment, etc. Still other times percentages of parent elements are appropriate.
You seem to be talking about .classes and #ids. Albeit you get it a bit mixed up: document.whatever looks like javascript DOM speak, but there is no document element in CSS; you use elementname.classname hence div.newsitem or a.external or ul.shaded li.odd. Non-intuitive? All you've got to remember is "." means class and "#" means ID. How hard is that? Of course it's not intuitive but what is? The dozens of reserved symbols and tokens in any markup or programming language from HTML to C far outstrip the "confusion" of .class vs #id.
If I had any remaining suspicions that you worked in the professional web design field (which I didn't), you'd have just shattered them for good. Even forgetting any co
Firefox nightly passes ACID2 (Score:1, Informative)
2006-12-13 Trunk builds:
* Fixed: 300030 - Refactor intrinsic width computation out of nsIFrame::Reflow (land dbaron's reflow branch).
This is a huge change that David Baron has been working on for about two years. It involved changing 201 files, simplifying many of them: a diff showed 8726 insertions but 18253 deletions, for a net removal of 9000 lines of code. It improved speed on page load tests by 3-5% and fixed over hundred bugs, including:
* Fixed: 69745 - Auto-width left float containing only nested right float is too wide.
* Fixed: 129346 - Fieldset renders incorrectly with style="float: left;" or any other shrink-wrap situation.
* Fixed: 269643 - When clicking link, page redraws with different layout, click is ignored.
* Fixed: 291126 - Intrinsically sized (shrink-wrap, auto-width) absolutely positioned element containing right float is too wide.
The reflow branch landing fixed the last remaining issues with the Acid 2 test, so Firefox trunk now passes the test.