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Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

(wiki.csswg.org)
197 points OuterVale | 1 comments | 11 Dec 25 04:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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edent ◴[11 Dec 25 04:45 UTC] No.46227773[source]▶
When I occasionally venture I to standards-land, I always ask "what user research have you done on this?"

So many weird design choices in computing are because one person said "this seems right to me" without considering other viewpoints or consulting with the wider community.

Sure, you probably dont want death by committee, but a tiny cabal engaging in groupthink often produces unhelpful results.

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1. pornel ◴[11 Dec 25 17:47 UTC] No.46234579[source]▶
Many of these mistakes weren't even made by any committee, but were stuff shipped in a rush by Netscape or Microsoft to win the browser wars.

There was some (academic) reaserch behind early CSS concept, but the original vision for it didn't pan out ("cascading" was meant to blend style preferences of users, browsers and page authors, but all we got is selector specificity footguns).

Netscape was planning to release their own imperative styling language, and ended up shipping a buggy CSS hackjob instead.

Once IE was dominant, Microsoft didn't think they have to listen to anybody, so for a while W3C was writing CSS specs that nobody implemented. It's hard to do user research when nothing works and 90% of CSS devs' work is fighting browser bugs.