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Should CSS be a constraint system instead?

(pavpanchekha.com)
37 points fanf2 | 2 comments | 07 Dec 25 18:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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troupo ◴[07 Dec 25 19:17 UTC] No.46184235[source]▶
I'm not convinced about the "edge case" at all. CSS made it an edge case for no reason at all, and made a silly default out of it.

If the box isn't big enough to contain center-aligned text, of course it should spill on both sides, because it's both expected and consistent.

And now the author pretends "we left-align text and spill on the right" as the only possible default behaviour that somehow makes constraints impossible/extremely difficult.

If you don't make assumptions and weird defaults in your system, you don't have to fight them and make weird workarounds.

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1. bryanrasmussen ◴[07 Dec 25 20:10 UTC] No.46184686[source]▶
>If you don't make assumptions then when edge cases happen that have not been programmed for then the system will probably crash.

>and weird defaults in your system

I'm not sure that there is any sufficiently complex logical system that will never have weird defaults, perhaps caused by the logic of some other seemingly sensible default. Complexity being the root cause of this overarching phenomenon.

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2. troupo ◴[07 Dec 25 21:31 UTC] No.46185359[source]▶
Yes, but you want as few of those as possible. And you don't want to stick to default assumptions from 35+ years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46185345