Cassius VS WHATWG HTML Standard

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).

WHAT-WG HTML

There's a long-standing WHATWG feature request open for it here: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791

And several userland custom element implementation, like https://www.npmjs.com/package//html-include-element

One of the cool things that you can do with client-side includes and shadow DOM is render the included HTML into a shadow root that has s, so that the child content of the include element is slotted into a shell implemented by the included HTML.

This lets you do things like have the main page be the pre-page content and the included HTML be a heavily cached site-wide shell, and then another per-user include with personalized HTML - all cached appropriately.

The `allow` attribute on iframes is a relatively recent API addition from 2017

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/3287

I think there's a pretty strong argument at this point for this kind of replacing DOM with a response behavior being part of the platform.

I think the first step would be an element that lets you load external content into the page declaratively. There's a spec issue open for this: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791

And my custom element implementation of the idea: https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-include-element

Then HTML could support these elements being targets of links.

> Consider https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt vs https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

I thought, oh, that's not so bad. Then I realized what I was looking at was a 10 page index.

I'd love to see something like HTMX get standardized, but I'm extremely pessimistic for HTMX's prospects for standardization in HTML.

In talking to a few standards folks about it, they've all said, "oh, yeah, you want declarative AJAX; people have tried and failed to get that standardized for years." Even just trying to get

to target a section of the page that isn't an has been argued about and hashed out for years.<p>Why is that? Well, for example, here's the form you have to fill out to start standardizing a front-end feature. <a href="https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/new?assignees=&labels=addition%2Fproposal%2Cneeds+implementer+interest&projects=&template=1-new-feature.yml">https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/new?assignees=&labels=...</a><p>It asks three main questions:<p>* What problem are you trying to solve?

The issue with a single global event handler is discussed here: https://github.com/WICG/close-watcher#a-single-event

If you use popover="", you get the kind of functionality you're discussing for free. For

, the discussion is in progress and reaching a conclusion: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9373