solimates.blogg.se - Stencyl still sucks

#Stencyl still sucks how to
#Stencyl still sucks software
#Stencyl still sucks code

Rounded Corners? I mean really! Again I refer you to Aldus and even MS Word circa 1997. In fact there seem to be endless debates about the proper way to hack together trivial things like rounded corners. The way CSS works there can be many ways to do the same thing. There shouldn’t be multiple right answers for a visual design.Supporting some of the features actually makes things worse. If you support V3 it has to be 100% supported and tested. Version compatibility has to be all or nothing. This also makes it harder for designers to create sites that target the new platform because they are constantly trying to satisfy the compatibility with older browsers. This makes it progressively harder to create powerful, compatible and consistent browsers. Any enhancements to CSS/HTML are piled on top of the old standards.

CSS and its HTML sibling are the ultimate designs by committee. Each version of CSS builds on the previous one without acknowledging any fundamental flaws. This process of starting fresh is absent from the current CSS way of thinking. You get new and better ideas and you throw away the old ones.

#Stencyl still sucks software

When writing software you learn what works and what doesn’t.

This is because good design tools start with the design, not the markup. Tools like Aldus Page Maker had better design tools, font tools and layout capabilities 10 years ago.

If browsers keep spending so much time on CSS they’ll have a well polished turd. It’ll be years before these features make it to CSS and many more before browsers implement them with any consistency. Highly developed design tools have layout engines that offer multiple layouts, non-rectangular margins, proportional layouts, dock-able layouts, table layouts, column layouts, etc. While this is a nice theory, it’s primitive in its understanding of both layout problems and design. The high level idea of CSS is that you can create attractive pages using margin, border, padding and content attributes. In theory cascading could save bandwidth but in practice it creates bloated documents to get around the cascading issues. In fact the complexities in cascading is one of the reasons why so many browsers screw up the standard. The cascading makes it harder to interpret the page for both the designer as well as the web-browser. By contrast non-cascading style sheets would be equally powerful and more predictable. Why on earth do we think that cascading is a useful feature? The way that styles cascade from one level of layout to a deeper layout makes it difficult to figure out why a particular item is styled in a certain way.

#Stencyl still sucks how to

CSS sucks because it forces designers to think about how to make it work technically rather than how to make it work from a design perspective. PDF/postscript is a good example of a design centric markup, (unfortunately not very suitable for the web.) Designers don’t argue about how to create semantically correct postscript tags they just create great designs using great design tools. Tools for designers should be design centric. Many designers take pride in hand coding CSS.

#Stencyl still sucks code

When I say ‘markup centric’ I mean that every CSS design tool forces users to go into source code mode to create an attractive modern site.

CSS is ‘markup centric’ not ‘design centric.’ I have this idea that designers should spend more time designing great looking sites and less time fiddling around with markup tags and browser compatibility.

Any designer who has tried to create a large and complex site using CSS will tell you that all popular browsers interpret the standard differently. Even though there is a “standard” and some browsers partially adhere to the standard to truly be a useful standard you need two things: Predictability and Consistency. How can I say it’s a failure when millions of sites use it? CSS can be used to style basic text attributes but browsers aren’t consistent in how they use this technology.

For all that CSS has been able to do it’s a technological failure.

I’ve reposted the blog post with the original comments from blogger as the original site was taken down.ĬSS is certainly an improvement on plain old HTML but its limitations are staggering and the lack of industry support will continue to hold back designers for many years to come unless we begin to build and design something better. CSS has certainly improved but it’s still holding back designers and engineers. It’s been 15 years and the core of the problem remains. The post was popular and somewhat controversial. In 2006 I wrote a blog post about how CSS sucks.