I haven't thought about styling tags like `<center>` and `<font>` in quite some time, and I'm glad for it. CSS is quite the wonder and I'll never talk bad about it again after this reminder.
I miss the old web, because we had vision and dreams for grander technology back then.
Bolted on design took a front seat, but it shouldn't have been our focus.
Open-ended CSS enabled us to reinvent styling and designs over and over and over. We've spent countless hours as a species grappling with how to present information, and how to reinvent the wheel. (Every brand needs to feel special, every company needs a design system.)
If these hours had been spent on semantics and reusability, we might have arrived at a different future. Perhaps rich document sharing rather than a web that's about who can have the fanciest scrolling upvote attention grabbers.
There were some bold ideas in the semantic web, microformats, RSS/RDF. Imagine sharing news and articles like P2P, insightful comments being ranked and scored, interest graphs being cultivated to better you rather than get you to like/subscribe. Platforms as an open and extensible standard.
CSS, meanwhile, is a tool that's being used to position a smiling alien creature that tells you to log into the mobile version.
We focused on the wrong things and evolved in the wrong direction. Shiny and flashy distracted us from rigor and enlightenment.
You know, this is a great example how people will find a reason to whine about just anything at all.
We still have microformats, and you're for some reason you're ranting about web economy issues like "like/subscribe" that have absolutely nothing to do with CSS.
In an interlinked multidimensional state space optimization problem, it has everything to do with CSS and the focus on form over function. We stopped thinking about how to make information exchange better, and instead on how to make it look good.
How energy is spent, and where focus is concentrated, are absolutely a limited and frequently pooled together resource. We like to bet on the horses people are feeding. When everyone boards the same ship, it becomes difficult to build new ones. To fund or succeed at other ventures.
I wasn't whining, I was making an observation amongst my shared state space explorers and perhaps wanting for some stories or commentary that rhymed. You made the leap to something that's not quite a personal attack, but that is definitely meant to sting. Attitudes on the web are really starting to sour these days. Have you any idea of the suffering everyone goes through? Just how similar we are?
Persons are meant to question the status quo and past decisions. There shouldn't be anything wrong with that. We shouldn't feel our pride being beaten by words that critique, but should take things into consideration. Perhaps the outcome is to discard outright, but maybe there's a glimmer of truth worth integration.
If I were a whining, I wouldn't be spending every other cycle I have building to fit my vision. I just don't have the time, capacity, or capability to build it all myself.
I see a better connected world without tyrannical ad giants controlling and extracting from us, telling us how to think and feel to drive engagement. The preamble to our evolution to post-biological entities that will one day inherit the stars. In that limit, there's no need for CSS or whatever bullshit we deal with today. Everything is just a temporary bridge to the future, including our minds and bodies themselves. Is that cynical?
> In an interlinked multidimensional state space optimization problem, it has everything to do with CSS and the focus on form over function. We stopped thinking about how to make information exchange better, and instead on how to make it look good.
You don't get to just decide that CSS is the most significant component that caused lack of magical unicorn semantic web.
Sure, if you want to look at the complete vector of reasons, maybe "John spent 2 years working on a CSS engine instead of accidentally inventing semantic unicorn web while high one day" is probably in there. But its weight is quite likely next to zero.
Wanna optimize the world? How about fight for more automatization of low-salary jobs, better education, and forming organizations around the initiatives you wanna see? Oh and let's ban reality TV shows and spectator sports while we're at it.
Said unicorn semantic web didn't happen for the same reason unicorns didn't happen. Just because a magical horned horse can be drawn or photoshopped together doesn't mean you have the actual thing.
Semantic web is ironically not semantically sound. Google fought for the semantic web in the 90s, saw it was 99% abused by spammers, and moved on. We still have microformats and so on.
This entire argument is just bunch of losers nerding over a failed concept from the 90s that was DESTINED to fail.
