Cassius VS csswg-drafts

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).

For more background, and some detailed discussion of the opposite argument ("display: masonry" over "display:grid"+"grid-template-rows: masonry") see https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9041

The tracking issue: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/8659

As noted there, okHSL/HSV keeps the perceptual uniformity by removing some peaks beyond the geometric limit of HSL/HSV, and it is unclear whether it is what users do expect or not.

The idea is that you should be able to set accent color via accent-color CSS property. It is discussed that there should be access to the color value of this property, e.g. via AccentColor or AccentColorText.

What do you mean by "official documentation"? The specification [1]? MDN [2]?

[1] https://drafts.csswg.org/

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS

The former is not meant as a learning resource for new web devs and the latter usually has information about the "baseline" support ond browser compatibility tables.

The link corresponding to the actual submission title (“CSS WG resolved to officially work on native custom functions and mixins”):

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9350#issuecomment...

> RESOLVED: Start ED of css-mixins for CSS Custom Functions and Mixins

Recently I was reading the Learn CSS the pedantic way book and the definition for inline boxes did not match the way that anonymous block boxes were generated when an inline-level element had a block-level element as its child. So I went looking elsewhere for a more appropriate definition for that case and found this issue on standards: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1477 It was really interesting to know that I was not the only one confused. My question was: Does the inline-box generated by the inline-level element contains the box generated by the block-level child or there wasn't an inline-box that was a parent of them all but there were 2 siblings inline-level boxes of the block-level box that were wrapped in another anonymous block boxes? Reading that issue I got to know the concept of fragments, which I did not know browsers had. But the issue seems to suggest that the box tree for this case should have the inline-box as being a parent of the block-box. Which led me to another question, in that case, if I apply a border to the parent inline-level element, shouldn't it apply to the overall box that is generated (it does not)? The answer is that borders between block-boxes and inline-level boxes should not intersect but that is really difficult to derive from reading the standards alone. Anyway it was headache-inducing trying to learn the box-model pedantically :)

With all the recent CSS improvements I still miss the possibility to have working transition to "height:auto". The issue [1] on csswg-drafts is the most upvoted one. At least we can now use css grid and track sizes transitions, but it's far from intuitive, transition for "height:auto" should just work.

[1]: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/626

Masonry isn’t ready to be shipped as there are still quite a few open spec issues [^1] that need to be resolved first.

[^1]: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3...

the irc log is here: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/7542#issuecomment...

i had the same reaction, it seems like a very weird syntax. but after reading the discussion i get it: you're telling a form field to behave like a normal html element, instead of behaving like a form field.