Cassius VS caniuse

FWIW, while there are unfortunately only very few attempts at formalizing CSS, there's at least an unofficial, unreviewed (?), partial formal semantics for (CSS 2-era) float layout based on z3 SMT and Racket you can take a look at to get a flavor, though it isn't receiving further development.

[1]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius

[2]: https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/css-floats.html

Do we need W3C anymore? The HTML 5 specification has been created by WHATWG for many years now, with W3C only rubber-stamping historic WHATWG versions until 2017 or so. SVG2 is going nowhere, and so isn't MathML, leaving the CSS working group as W3C's remaining point of influence over the Web. CSS is regarded as so poor and overdone a specification that the only two external projects for a formal specification have failed or remained woefully incomplete (1, 2).

1. CSS should've been split into app-y styles and doc-y styles a looong time ago; meaning that when you need JavaScript to make use of a feature anyway, there's no point in using CSS and it's better to set styles, layout using JavaScript rather than bloat CSS. The Houdini API was on the right track years ago.

2. The CSS WG at W3C must deliver formal specification rather than the prose they're writing up now. For an idea how a (partial) formal spec for CSS rendering looks like, see eg. [1], [2] (with limitations).

The one way complexity that both W3C and WHATWG have delivered over the past 15 years with complete lack of mental discipline due to financial dependency/job security will be a major source of confusion for generations to cone, and will not be looked at favorably.

[1]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius

[2]: https://github.com/lmeyerov/sc

There's this cool project using z3 (and racket) for formalizing CSS rendering [1] I never came around to lift for anything. Maybe someone else interested in leading the web out of the dark ages and give W3C's CSS WG an idea what we expect from them will.

[1]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius

FWIW, I know two (partial, kinda) formal specifications of CSS normal flow and float layout, both of which are finished ie dead projects:

[1]: https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/paper....

[2]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius

(not counting the 1990s constraint CSS effort).

The first was merely part of a parallel compiler project and also covers table layout, whereas the second is a Racket (Scheme) program to formulate the HTML doc and CSS rules as a theory for submitting to z3 SMT to solve all kinds of decision problems (it can also produce a rendering).

Not sure that's very helpful; it would be cool if W3C can invest some time into better specs (not just prose).

Can I X, is a question about the readiness/compliance of a certain thing at time = now. Can I use CSS version X was the iconic early meme.

https://caniuse.com/?search=css3

For a generalized example, if you wanted to know if the basketball courts were ready for you to “ball it up” in a certain city, it’d be caniball.com

If you want to know if you can use a certain frontend technology, the idea is like: canwefigma?

It’s a glorified feature matrix, and usually a project of a passionate community. I approve, even if some of the memes are a bit dank.

https://caniuse.com/ is a popular tool to check what web features are working across different browsers - "can you use this and assume that it will work for others".

The article uses custom css @properties which are awesome and have 88% browser support [1].

One thing to watch out for is differences in how browsers handle setting the fallback initial-value. Chrome will use initial-value if CSS variable is undefined OR set to an invalid value. Firefox will only use initial-value if the variable is undefined. For most projects, this won't be an issue, but for a recent project, I ended up needing to use javascript to set default values in Firefox to iron out the inconsistency between browser implementations.

[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=%40property

Safari is the only browser that doesn't support extending HTML element

https://caniuse.com/?search=Custom%20Elements

You forgot to mention (Web)Workers. This is explicit creation, management, and communication with additional threads within JavaScript. What's more, they've been around in JavaScript longer than the V8 engine has even existed!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...

https://caniuse.com/?search=webworkers

Do you happen to know where can I check out the cutoff version for each browser? https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm doesn't have it (or other things like WasmGC for that matter)

(https://caniuse.com/) A handy tool for checking the browser compatibility of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features. Can I Use provides up-to-date support tables for various web technologies across different browsers.

Caniuse