Thoughts From Eric Archive

In my previous post, I wrote about a way to center elements based on their content, without forcing the element to be a specific width, while preserving the interior text alignment.  In this post, I’d like to talk about why I developed that technique.

Near the beginning of this year, fellow Web nerd and nuclear history buff Chris Griffith mentioned a project to put an entire book online: The Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, specifically the third (1977) edition.  Like Chris, I own a physical copy of this book, and in fact, the information and tools therein were critical to the creation of HYDEsim, way back in the Aughts.  I acquired it while in pursuit of my degree in History, for which I studied the Cold War and the policy effects of the nuclear arms race, from the first bombers to the Strategic Defense Initiative.

I was immediately intrigued by the idea and volunteered my technical services, which Chris accepted.  So we started taking the OCR output of a PDF scan of the book, cleaning up the myriad errors, re-typing the bits the OCR mangled too badly to just clean up, structuring it all with HTML, converting figures to PNGs and photos to JPGs, and styling the whole thing for publication, working after hours and in odd down times to bring this historical document to the Web in a widely accessible form.  The result of all that work is now online.

That linked page is the best example of the technique I wrote about in the aforementioned previous post: as a Table of Contents, none of the lines actually get long enough to wrap.  Rather than figuring out the exact length of the longest line and centering based on that, I just let CSS do the work for me.

There were a number of other things I invented (probably re-invented) as we progressed.  Footnotes appear at the bottom of pages when the footnote number is activated through the use of the :target pseudo-class and some fixed positioning.  It’s not completely where I wanted it to be, but I think the rest will require JS to pull off, and my aim was to keep the scripting to an absolute minimum.

I couldn’t keep the scripting to zero, because we decided early on to use MathJax for the many formulas and other mathematical expressions found throughout the text.  I’d never written LaTeX before, and was very quickly impressed by how compact and yet powerful the syntax is.

Over time, I do hope to replace the MathJax-parsed LaTeX with raw MathML for both accessibility and project-weight reasons, but as of this writing, Chromium lacks even halfway-decent MathML support, so we went with the more widely-supported solution.  (My colleague Frédéric Wang at Igalia is pushing hard to fix this sorry state of affairs in Chromium, so I do have hopes for a migration to MathML… some day.)

The figures (as distinct from the photos) throughout the text presented an interesting challenge.  To look at them, you’d think SVG would be the ideal image format. Had they come as vector images, I’d agree, but they’re raster scans.  I tried recreating one or two in hand-crafted SVG and quickly determined the effort to create each was significant, and really only worked for the figures that weren’t charts, graphs, or other presentations of data.  For anything that was a chart or graph, the risk of introducing inaccuracies was too high, and again, each would have required an inordinate amount of effort to get even close to correct.  That’s particularly true considering that without knowing what font face was being used for the text labels in the figures, they’d have to be recreated with paths or polygons or whatever, driving the cost-to-recreate astronomically higher.

So I made the figures PNGs that are mostly transparent, except for the places where there was ink on the paper.  After any necessary straightening and some imperfection cleanup in Acorn, I then ran the PNGs through the color-index optimization process I wrote about back in 2020, which got them down to an average of 75 kilobytes each, ranging from 443KB down to 7KB.

At the 11th hour, still secretly hoping for a magic win, I ran them all through svgco.de to see if we could get automated savings.  Of the 161 figures, exactly eight of them were made smaller, which is not a huge surprise, given the source material.  So, I saved those eight for possible future updates and plowed ahead with the optimized PNGs.  Will I return to this again in the future?  Probably.  It bugs me that the figures could be better, and yet aren’t.

It also bugs me that we didn’t get all of the figures and photos fully described in alt text.  I did write up alternative text for the figures in Chapter I, and a few of the photos have semi-decent captions, but this was something we didn’t see all the way through, and like I say, that bugs me.  If it also bugs you, please feel free to fork the repository and submit a pull request with good alt text.  Or, if you prefer, you could open an issue and include your suggested alt text that way.  By the image, by the section, by the chapter: whatever you can contribute would be appreciated.

Those image captions, by the way?  In the printed text, they’re laid out as a label (e.g., “Figure 1.02”) and then the caption text follows.  But when the text wraps, it doesn’t wrap below the label.  Instead, it wraps in its own self-contained block instead, with the text fully justified except for the last line, which is centered.  Centered!  So I set up the markup and CSS like this:

<figure>
	<img src="…" alt="…" loading="lazy">
	<figcaption>
		<span>Figure 1.02.</span> <span>Effects of a nuclear explosion.</span>
	</figcaption>
</figure>

figure figcaption {
	display: grid;
	grid-template-columns: max-content auto;
	gap: 0.75em;
	justify-content: center;
	text-align: justify;
	text-align-last: center;
}

Oh CSS Grid, how I adore thee.  And you too, CSS box alignment.  You made this little bit of historical recreation so easy, it felt like cheating.

Some other things weren’t easy.  The data tables, for example, have a tendency to align columns on the decimal place, even when most but not all of the numbers are integers.  Long, long ago, it was proposed that text-align be allowed a string value, something like text-align: '.', which you could then apply to a table column and have everything line up on that character.  For a variety of reasons, this was never implemented, a fact which frosts my windows to this day.  In general, I mean, though particularly so for this project.  The lack of it made keeping the presentation historically accurate a right pain, one I may get around to writing about, if I ever overcome my shame.  [Editor’s note: he overcame that shame.]

There are two things about the book that we deliberately chose not to faithfully recreate.  The first is the font face.  My best guess is that the book was typeset using something from the Century family, possibly Century Schoolbook (the New version of which was a particular favorite of mine in college).  The very-widely-installed Cambria seems fairly similar, at least to my admittedly untrained eye, and furthermore was designed specifically for screen media, so I went with body text styling no more complicated than this:

body {
	font: 1em/1.35 Cambria, Times, serif;
	hyphens: auto;
}

I suppose I could have tracked down a free version of Century and used it as a custom font, but I couldn’t justify the performance cost in both download and rendering speed to myself and any future readers.  And the result really did seem close enough to the original to accept.

The second thing we didn’t recreate is the printed-page layout, which is two-column.  That sort of layout can work very well on the book page; it almost always stinks on a Web page.  Thus, the content of the book is rendered online in a single column.  The exceptions are the chapter-ending Bibliography sections and the book’s Index, both of which contain content compact and granular enough that we could get away with the original layout.

There’s a lot more I could say about how this style or that pattern came about, and maybe someday I will, but for now let me leave you with this: all these decisions are subject to change, and open to input.  If you come up with a superior markup scheme for any of the bits of the book, we’re happy to look at pull requests or issues, and to act on them.  It is, as we say in our preface to the online edition, a living project.

We also hope that, by laying bare the grim reality of these horrific weapons, we can contribute in some small way to making them a dead and buried technology.

• Recreating “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” for the Web was published on Tuesday, August 9th, 2022.
• It was assigned to the History, Projects, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

In a recent side project that I hope will become public fairly soon, I needed to center a left-aligned list of links inside the sides of the viewport, but also line-wrap in cases where the lines got too long (as in mobile). There are a few ways to do this, but I came up with one that was new to me. Here’s how it works.

First, let’s have a list.  Pretend each list item contains a link so that I don’t have to add in all the extra markup.

<ol>
	<li>Foreword</li>
	<li>Chapter 1: The Day I Was Born</li>
	<li>Chapter 2: Childhood</li>
	<li>Chapter 3: Teachers I Admired</li>
	<li>Chapter 4: Teenage Dreaming</li>
	<li>Chapter 5: Look Out World</li>
	<li>Chapter 6: The World Strikes Back</li>
	<li>Chapter 7: Righting My Ship</li>
	<li>Chapter 8: In Hindsight</li>
	<li>Afterword</li>
</ol>

Great. Now I want it to be centered in the viewport, without centering the text. In other words, the text should all be left-aligned, but the element containing them should be as centered as possible.

One way to do this is to wrap the <ol> element in another element like a <div> and then use flexbox:

div.toc {
	display: flex;
	justify-content: center;
}

That makes sense if you want to also vertically center the list (with align-items: center) and if you’re already going to be wrapping the list with something that should be flexed, but neither really applied in this case, and I didn’t want to add a wrapper element that had no other purpose except centering. It’s 2022, there ought to be another way, right? Right. And this is it:

ol {
	max-inline-size: max-content;
	margin-inline: auto;
}

I also could have used width there in place of max-inline-size since this is in English, so the inline axis is horizontal, but as Jeremy pointed out, it’s a weird clash to have a physical property (width) and a logical property (margin-inline) working together. So here, I’m going all-logical, which is probably better for the ongoing work of retraining myself to instinctively think in logical directions anyway.

Thanks to max-inline-size: max-content, the list can’t get any wider (more correctly: any longer along the inline axis) than the longest list item. If the container is wider than that, then margin-inline: auto means the ol element’s box will be centered in the container, as happens with any block box where the width is set to a specific amount, there’s leftover space in the container, and the side margins of the box are set to auto. This is as if I’d pre-calculated the maximum content size to be (say) 434 pixels wide and then declared max-inline-size: 434px.

The great thing here is that I don’t have to do that pre-calculation, which would be very fragile in any case. I can just use max-content instead. And then, if the container ever gets too small to fit the longest bit of content, because the ol was set to max-inline-size instead of just straight inline-size, it can fill out the container as block boxes usually do, and the content inside it can wrap to multiple lines.

Perhaps it’s not the most common of layout needs, but if you find yourself wanting a lightweight way to center the box of an element with side-aligned content, maybe this will work for you.

What’s nice about this is that it’s one of those simple things that was difficult-to-impossible for so long, with hacks and workarounds needed to make it work at all, and now it… just works.  No extra markup, not even any calc()-ing, just a couple of lines that say exactly what they do, and are what you want them to do.  It’s a nice little example of the quiet revolution that’s been happening in CSS of late.  Hard things are becoming easy, and more than easy, simple.  Simple in the sense of “direct and not complex”, not in the sense of “obvious and basic”.  There’s a sense of growing maturity in the language, and I’m really happy to see it.

• Flexibly Centering an Element with Side-Aligned Content was published on Tuesday, April 26th, 2022.
• It was assigned to the CSS category.
• There have been six replies.

The CSSWG (CSS Working Group) is currently debating what to name a conditional structure, and it’s kind of fascinating.  There are a lot of strong opinions, and I’m not sure how many of them are weakly held.

Boiled down to the bare bones, the idea is to take the conditional structures CSS already has, like @supports and @media, and allow more generic conditionals that combine and enhance what those structures make possible.  To pick a basic example, this:

@supports (display: grid) {
	@media (min-width: 33em) {
		…
	}
}

…would become something like this:

@conditional supports(display: grid) and media(min-width: 33em) {
	…
}

This would also be extended to allow for alternates, something like:

@conditional supports(display: grid) and media(min-width: 33em) {
	…
} @otherwise {
	…
}

Except nobody wants to have to type @conditional and @otherwise, so the WG went in search of shorter names.

The Sass-savvy among you are probably jumping up and down right now, shouting “We have that! We have that already! Just call them @if and @else and finally get on our level!”  And yes, you do have that already: Sass uses exactly those keywords.  There are some minor syntactic differences (Sass doesn’t require parentheses around the conditional tests, for example) and it’s not clear whether CSS would allow testing of variable values the way Sass does, but they’re very similar.

And that’s a problem, because if CSS starts using @if and @else, there is the potential for syntactic train wrecks.  If you’re writing with Sass, how will it tell the difference between its @if and the CSS @if?  Will you be forever barred from using CSS conditionals in Sass, if that’s what goes into CSS?  Or will Sass be forced to rename those conditionals to something else, in order to avoid clashing — and if so, how much upheaval will that create for Sass authors?

The current proposal, as I write this, is to use @when and @else in CSS Actual.  Thus, something like:

@when supports(display: grid) and media(min-width: 33em) {
	…
} @else {
	…
}

Even though there is overlap with @else, apparently starting the overall structure with @when would allow Sass to tell the difference.  So that would sidestep clashing with Sass.

But should the CSS WG even care that a third-party code base’s syntax gets trampled on by CSS syntax?  I imagine Sass authors would say, “Uh, hell yeah they should”, but does that outweigh the potential learning hurdle of all the non-Sass authors, both now and over the next few decades, learning that @when doesn’t actually have temporal meaning and is just an alias for the more recognizable if statement?

Because while it’s true that some programming languages have a when conditional structure (kOS being the one I’ve used most recently), they usually also have an if structure, and the two sometimes mean different things.  There is a view held by some that using the label when when we really mean if is a mistake, one that will stand out as a weird choice and a design blunder, 10 years hence, and will create a cognitive snag in the process of learning CSS.  Others hold the view that when is a relatively common programming term, it’s sometimes synonymous with if, every language has quirks that new learners need to learn, and it’s worth avoiding a clash with tools and authors that already exist.

If you ask me, both views are true, and that’s the real problem.  I imagine most of the participants in the discussion, even if their strong opinions are strongly held, can at least see where the other view is rooted, and sympathize with it.  And it’s very likely the case that even if Sass and other tools didn’t exist, the WG would still be having the same debate, because both terms work in context.  I suspect if would have won by now, but who knows?  Maybe not.  There have been longer debates over less fundamental concepts over the years.

A lot of my professional life has been spent explaining CSS to people new to it, so that may be why I personally lean toward @if over @when.  It’s a bit easier to explain, it looks more familiar to anyone who’s done programming at just about any level, and semantically it makes a bit more sense to me.  It’s also true that I come from a place of not having to worry about Sass changing on me, because I’ve basically never used it (or any other CSS pre-processor, for that matter) and I don’t have to do the heavy lifting of rewriting Sass to deal with this.  So, easy for me to say!

That said, I have an instinctive distrust of arguments by majority.  Yes, the number of Sass developers who’d have to adapt Sass to @if in CSS Actual is vanishingly small compared to the population of current and future CSS authors, and the number of Sass authors is likely much smaller than the number of total CSS authors.  That doesn’t automatically mean they should be discounted. It’s good to keep CSS as future-proof as possible, but it should also be kept as present-proof as possible.

The rub comes in with “as possible”, though.  This isn’t a situation where all things are possible. Something’s going to give, and there will be a group of people ill-served by the result.  Will it be Sass authors?  Future CSS learners?  Another group?  Everyone?  We’ll see!

• When or If was published on Monday, March 14th, 2022.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Standards, and Tools categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

It’s not every week the release notes for a preview build of a web browser ignite Yet Another Twitter Teacup Storm (YATTS™), but that’s what happened when Safari Technology Preview 138 dropped late last week. At least, it’s what happened in the Twitter Teacups I tend to sip.

Just in case you missed it, here’s the summary:

1. The WebKit team released Safari Technology Preview 138, and the release notes for same.
2. The “CSS” section of the release notes started with a line saying:

   Enabled :focus-visible pseudo-class by default (r286783, r286776, r286775)

3. A few people, including Jen Simmons, gave credit to Igalia for implementing :focus-visible by means of a crowdfunding project (more on that in a moment).
4. KABOOM

I suppose I could be a bit more explicit in step 4, but I don’t really want to get into speculating on apparent motives and assumptions by others, because that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to clear up what seems to be a very common misunderstanding.

What I kept seeing people saying was something to the effect of, “Why the hell did Apple have to crowdfund this feature?” And that’s wrong in two ways:

1. Apple doesn’t have to crowdfund anything, up to and including colonization of the Moon. (They might have to ask for a few bucks to do Venus or Mars.)
2. Apple didn’t crowdfund :focus-visible.

This isn’t me splitting hairs, either. Nobody at Apple asked the crowd to fund anything. Nobody at Apple asked Igalia to crowdfund anything. They didn’t even ask Igalia to implement :focus-visible, and then Igalia decided to crowdfund the work. In fact, all of those assumptions get things almost exactly backwards — which is understandable! It’s what we expect from our experience of how the web has developed since at least the late 1990s. But here, something new happened.

So, let me summarize what happened using yet another ordered list:

1. Igalia noticed they’d done a fair bit of work adding features to all the browser engines (e.g., CSS Grid), with each project supported by a single paying client, and thought, “Wait a minute, the web is a commons. Why are features being driven one client at a time?”
2. Of its own volition, Igalia decided to experiment with the idea of letting the web community (the “crowd”) vote for implementation of a missing browser feature with their wallets (the “funding”). They called this ongoing experiment Open Prioritization, and launched it in 2019.
3. There were six possible projects, chosen by Igalia through their own set of criteria, for the community to vote on by pledging monetary support:
   • CSS lab() colors in Firefox
   • :focus-visible in WebKit/Safari
   • HTML inert in WebKit/Safari
   • Selector list arguments for :not() in Chrome
   • CSS Containment support in WebKit/Safari
   • CSS d (SVG path) support in Firefox
4. The winner was implementing :focus-visible in WebKit/Safari, and by “winner”, I mean that project got the most monetary commitment from the members of the community.
5. Igalia matched the community contributions dollar for dollar, and moved forward with the work.
6. The work was done, and submitted to the WebKit code base. (Along the way, inconsistencies and other problems were discovered, addressed, and fixes contributed to engines other than WebKit.)
7. The WebKit team accepted Igalia’s contributions, and are now shipping them in a preview build of Safari for developers to test out.

In other words: the community (more precisely, a portion of it) voted on which feature was most needed, Igalia implemented it, and Apple accepted it. Apple’s role in this process came at the end, not the beginning.

And no, this is not the usual thing! It’s not supposed to be. Igalia is deeply committed to not just advancing the web, but to an unprecedented extent democratizing that advancement. It isn’t anything like a pure democratic effort, at least not yet, but these are early days and the initiative is structured to meet the current constraints of the environment (read: living under capitalism means coders gotta get paid).

But why is Igalia doing this? Time for another list! Just to switch things up, this one will be unordered:

• Because the community should have more of a say in what gets prioritized in browsers. The community can be large collections of individuals, or it could be small collections of small companies, or a mix.
• Because in every browser team, there’s always a priority list, and sometimes good features get pushed down that list for various reasons. It could be lack of expertise. It could be lack of time. It could be lack of interest. It could be interference by higher-ups. It doesn’t matter.
• Because browser teams — not any one team, but the unfortunately small number of browser teams — are a bottleneck. No matter how much money the companies who employ those teams throw at them, they will always be a bottleneck, because resources are finite.

And this brings us to why I think “Wait, shouldn’t the $browser_name team have already done $feature_name by now? Why did an outside party have to do it?” is a little short-sighted. There will always be a $feature_name that the $browser_name team hasn’t done yet, for any value of $browser_name you care to posit. Today it could be WebKit; tomorrow, Chromium. In ten years, maybe there will be teams at Amazon and Huawei, making browser engines that compete for user share. Maybe not. Doesn’t actually matter, because however many or few engines there are, no matter what their priorities are, this problem will persist.

This is also why I’m not getting into Apple’s funding levels and priorities for WebKit and the web. Yes, there is much Apple-the-company can be criticized about, and personally, I am one of the biggest fans browser-engine diversity ever had, but that is a different conversation. Even if you could somehow wave a magic wand and open all platforms everywhere to engine diversity, and simultaneously cause a thousand browsers to bloom, we would still have the same basic problem. Open Prioritization would still need to exist.

For another piece of evidence on that point, look at the second Open Prioritization project: MathML-Core, whose goal is to bring full cross-browser support for the MathML Core specification to browsers, starting with Chrome (which needs the most work in this area) and then moving on to other engines (which need less work, but still need work). Doing this will not only improve support for web-wide math markup and its visual rendering, but will also improve the accessibility of math content on the web by making math a first-class content type in browsers. And you can even now contribute to this effort with a pledge of your own!

“But wait, why didn’t $browser_name already finish implementing MathML Core?” It doesn’t matter. Whether or not $browser_name (whichever one that is) should have done this by now, they haven’t. Maybe they would have done it eventually, but again, that doesn’t matter. We can make it happen now.

That’s what happened with :focus-visible in WebKit, which helped improve other engines; it’s what will happen with MathML Core in various browsers; and it could very well be what happens with other features in the future. Igalia would love nothing more than to see more and more projects launch, even if they don’t get hired to do the work for a single one of them. This isn’t us spackling over the cracks of browser teams’ neglect. This is us trying to chart an entirely new way to advance browser engines.

I go deeper into all of the above, as well as how Open Prioritization is designed to be an open forum and not some private reserve of Igalia’s, in a 17-minute talk delivered at W3C TPAC in fall 2021, available and captioned on Igalia’s YouTube channel. This post sort of summarizes it, but there are more examples and details in the talk, so if you’re interested, please do check that out.

Just in case your eyes sort of glazed and you skipped to the end to see if there was a TL;DR, here it is:

The addition of :focus-visible to WebKit was lead by the community, done by Igalia, and contributed to WebKit without any involvement from Apple except in the sense of their reviewing patches and accepting the contributions. Many of us are mad at Apple for a lot of good reasons, but please don’t let the process of venting that anger tar the goals and achievements of Open Prioritization. The future browser-feature priority you save may be your own.

• No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari was published on Monday, January 24th, 2022.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Commentary, and Web categories.
• There have been nine replies.

As you might have noticed, I recently wrote about how I got started with CSS a quarter century ago,  what I’ve seen change over that long span of time, and the role testing has played in both of those things.

After all, CSS tests are most of how I got onto the Cascading Style Sheets & Formatting Properties Working Group (as it was known then) back in the late 1990s.  After I’d finished creating tests for nearly all of CSS, I wrote the chair of the CSS&FP WG, Chris Lilley, about it.  The conversation went something like, “Hey, I have all these tests I’ve created, would the WG or browser makers be at all interested in using them?”  To which the answer was a resounding yes.

Not too much later, I made some pithy-snarky comment on www-style about how only the Cool Kids on the WG knew what was going on with something or other, and I wasn’t one of them, pout pout.  At which point Chris emailed me to say something like, “We have this role called Invited Expert; how would you like to be one?”  To which the answer was a resounding (if slightly stunned) yes.

I came aboard with a lot of things in mind, but the main thing was to merge my test suite with some other tests and input from smart folks to create the very first official W3C test suite.  Of any kind, not just for CSS.  It was announced alongside the promotion of CSS2 to Recommendation status in December 1998.

I stayed an Invited Expert for a few years, but around 2003 I withdrew from the group for lack of time and input, and for the last 17-some years, that’s how it’s stayed.  Until now, that is: as of yesterday, I’ve rejoined the CSS Working Group, this time as an official Member, one of several representing Igalia.  And fittingly, Chris Lilley was the first to welcome me back.

I’m returning to take back up the mantle I carried the first time around: testing CSS.  I intend to focus on creating Web Platform Test entries demonstrating new CSS features, clarifying changes to existing specifications, and filling in areas of CSS that are under-tested.  Maybe even to draft tests for things the WG is debating, to explore what a given proposal would mean in terms of real-world rendering.

My thanks to Igalia for enabling my return to the CSS WG, as well as supporting my contributions yet to come.  And many thanks to the WG for a warm welcome.  I have every hope that I’ll be able to once more help CSS grow and improve in my own vaguely unique way.

• Back in the CSSWG was published on Tuesday, June 8th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

She would have become a teenager this morning, but she didn’t.  She would have had her bat mitzvah ceremony this past weekend, as her best friend in the world actually did, but she didn’t.  So many more nevers.

I find myself not wanting to talk about it at all, and also wanting to talk about it all the time.  This hole, this void, this screaming silent tear in the world that so many can feel but nobody outside that circle can see.  How do I make someone who didn’t know her understand?  Why would I bring it up with someone who already knows?  Where can I go to fill it, to make things complete?

Nowhere, of course.  No where, no why, no how.

They tell you that some milestones will be hard to accept, when you become a parent.

They don’t tell you how much harder it will be to accept the milestones that were never passed.

• Not a Teen was published on Monday, June 7th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Rebecca category.
• There have been ten replies.

After my post the other day about how I got started with CSS 25 years ago, I found myself reflecting on just how far CSS itself has come over all those years.  We went from a multi-year agony of incompatible layout models to the tipping point of April 2017, when four major Grid implementations shipped in as many weeks, and were very nearly 100% consistent with each other.  I expressed delight and astonishment at the time, but it still, to this day, amazes me.  Because that’s not what it was like when I started out.  At all.

I know it’s still fashionable to complain about how CSS is all janky and weird and unapproachable, but child, the wrinkles of today are a sunny park stroll compared to the jagged icebound cliff we faced at the dawn of CSS.  Just a few examples, from waaaaay back in the day:

• In the initial CSS implementation by Netscape Navigator 4, padding was sometimes a void.  What I mean is, you could give an element a background color, and you could set a border, but if you adding any padding, in some situations it wouldn’t take on the background color, allowing the background of the parent element to show through.  Today, we can recreate that effect like so:

  border: 3px solid red;
  padding: 0.5em;
  background-color: cornflowerblue;
  background-clip: content-box;
  

  Padding as a void.

  But we didn’t have background-clip in those days, and backgrounds weren’t supposed to act like that.  It was just a bug that got fixed a few versions later. (It was easier to get browsers to fix bugs in those days, because the web was a lot smaller, and so were the stakes.)  Until that happened, if you wanted a box with border, background, padding, and content in Navigator, you wrapped a <div> inside another <div>, then applied the border and background to the outer and the padding (or a margin, at that point it didn’t matter) to the inner.
• In another early Navigator 4 version, pica math was inverted: Instead of 12 points per pica, it was set to 12 picas per point — so 12pt equated to 144pc instead of 1pc.  Oops.
• Navigator 4’s handling of color values was another fun bit of bizarreness.  It would try to parse any string as if it were hexadecimal, but it did so in this weird way that meant if you declared color: inherit it would render in, as one person put it, “monkey-vomit green”.
• Internet Explorer for Windows started out by only tiling background images down and to the right.  Which was fine if you left the origin image in the top left corner, but as soon as you moved it with background-position, the top and left sides of the element just… wouldn’t have any background.  Sort of like Navigator’s padding void!
• At one point, IE/Win (as we called it then) just flat out refused to implement background-position: fixed.  I asked someone on that team point blank if they’d ever do it, and got just laughter and then, “Ah no.” (Eventually they relented, opening the door for me to create complexspiral and complexspiral distorted.)
• For that matter, IE/Win didn’t inherit font sizes into tables.  Which would be annoying even today, but in the era of still needing tables to do page-level layout, it was a real problem.
• IE/Win had so many layout bugs, there were whole sites dedicated to cataloging and explaining them.  Some readers will remember, and probably shudder to do so, the Three-Pixel Text Jog, the Phantom Box Bug, the Peekaboo Bug, and more.  Or, for that matter, hasLayout/zoom.
• And perhaps most famous of all, Netscape and Opera implemented the W3C box model (2021 equivalent: box-sizing: content-box) while Microsoft implemented an alternative model (2021 equivalent: box-sizing: border-box), which meant apparently simple CSS meant to size elements would yield different results in different browsers.  Possibly vastly different, depending on the size of the padding and so on.  Which model is more sensible or intuitive doesn’t actually matter here: the inconsistency literally threatened the survival of CSS itself.  Neither side was willing to change to match the other — “we have customers!” was the cry — and nobody could agree on a set of new properties to replace height and width.  It took the invention of DOCTYPE switching to rescue CSS from the deadlock, which in turn helped set the stage for layout-behavior properties like box-sizing.

I could go on.  I didn’t even touch on Opera’s bugs, for example.  There was just so much that was wrong.  Enough so that in a fantastic bit of code aikido, Tantek turned browsers’ parsing bugs against them, redirecting those failures into ways to conditionally deliver specific CSS rules to the browsers that needed them.  A non-JS, non-DOCTYPE form of browser sniffing, if you like — one of the earliest progenitors of feature queries.

I said DOCTYPE switching saved CSS, and that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth.  So did the Web Standards Project, WaSP for short.  A group of volunteers, sick of the chaotic landscape of browser incompatibilities (some intentional) and the extra time and cost of dealing with them, who made the case to developers, browser makers, and the tech press that there was a better way, one where browsers were compatible on the basics like W3C specifications, and could compete on other features.  It was a long, wearying, sometimes frustrating, often derided campaign, but it worked.

The state of the web today, with its vast capability and wide compatibility, owes a great deal to the WaSP and its allies within browser teams.  I remember the time that someone working on a browser — I won’t say which one, or who it was — called me to discuss the way the WaSP was treating their browser. “I want you to be tougher on us,” they said, surprising the hell out of me. “If we can point to outside groups taking us to task for falling short, we can make the case internally to get more resources.”  That was when I fully grasped that corporations aren’t monoliths, and formulated my version of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by resource constraints.”

In order to back up what we said when we took browsers to task, we needed test cases.  This not only gave the CSS1 Test Suite a place of importance, but also the tests the WaSP’s CSS Action Committee (aka the CSS Samurai) devised.  The most famous of these is the first CSS Acid Test, which was added to the CSS1 Test Suite and was even used as an Easter egg in Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh.

The need for testing, whether acid or basic, lives on in the Web Platform Tests, or WPT for short.  These tests form a vital link in the development of the web.  They allow specification authors to create reference results for the rules in those specifications, and they allow browser makers to see if the code they’re writing yields the correct results.  Sometimes, an implementation fails a test and the implementor can’t figure out why, which leads to a discussion with the authors of the specification, and that can lead to clarifications of the specification, or to fixing flawed tests, or even to both.  Realize just how harmonious browser support for HTML and CSS is these days, and know that WPT deserves a big part of the credit for that harmony.

As much as the Web Standards Project set us on the right path, the Web Platform Tests keep us on that path.  And I can’t lie, I feel like the WPT is to the CSS1 Test Suite much like feature queries are to those old CSS parser hacks.  The latter are much greater and more powerful than than the former, but there’s an evolutionary line that connects them.  Forerunners and inheritors.  Ancestors and descendants.

It’s been a real privilege to be present as CSS first emerged, to watch as it’s developed into the powerhouse it is today, and to be a part of that story — a story that is, I believe, far from over.  There are still many ways for CSS to develop, and still so many things we have yet to discover in its feature set.  It’s still an entrancing language, and I hope I get to be entranced for another 25 years.

Thanks to Brian Kardell, Jenn Lukas, and Melanie Sumner for their input and suggestions.

• Ancestors and Descendants was published on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021.
• It was assigned to the CSS, History, and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

It was the morning of Tuesday, May 7th and I was sitting in the Ambroisie conference room of the CNIT in Paris, France having my mind repeatedly blown by an up-and-coming web technology called “Cascading Style Sheets”, 25 years ago this month.

I’d been the Webmaster at Case Western Reserve University for just over two years at that point, and although I was aware of table-driven layout, I’d resisted using it for the main campus site.  All those table tags just felt… wrong.  Icky.  And yet, I could readily see how not using tables hampered my layout options.  I’d been holding out for something better, but increasingly unsure how much longer I could wait.

Having successfully talked the university into paying my way to Paris to attend WWW5, partly by having a paper accepted for presentation, I was now sitting in the W3C track of the conference, seeing examples of CSS working in a browser, and it just felt… right.  When I saw a single word turned a rich blue and 100-point size with just a single element and a few simple rules, I was utterly hooked.  I still remember the buzzing tingle of excitement that encircled my head as I felt like I was seeing a real shift in the web’s power, a major leap forward, and exactly what I’d been holding out for.

Looking back at my hand-written notes (laptops were heavy, bulky, battery-poor, and expensive in those days, so I didn’t bother taking one with me) from the conference, which I still have, I find a lot that interests me.  HTTP 1.1 and HTML 3.2 were announced, or at least explained in detail, at that conference.  I took several notes on the brand-new <OBJECT> element and wrote “CENTER is in!”, which I think was an expression of excitement.  Ah, to be so young and foolish again.

There are other tidbits: a claim that “standards will trail innovation” — something that I feel has really only happened in the past decade or so — and that “Math has moved to ActiveMath”, the latter of which is a term I freely admit I not only forgot, but still can’t recall in any way whatsoever.

But I did record that CSS had about 35 properties, and that you could associate it with markup using <LINK REL=STYLESHEET>, <STYLE>…</STYLE>, or <H1 STYLE="…">.  There’s a question — “Gradient backgrounds?” — that I can’t remember any longer if it was a note to myself to check later, or something that was floated as a possibility during the talk.  I did take notes on image backgrounds, text spacing, indents (which I managed to misspell), and more.

What I didn’t know at the time was that CSS was still largely vaporware.  Implementations were coming, sure, but the demos I’d seen were very narrowly chosen and browser support was minimal at best, not to mention wildly inconsistent.  I didn’t discover any of this until I got back home and started experimenting with the language.  With a printed copy of the CSS1 specification next to me, I kept trying things that seemed like they should work, and they didn’t.  It didn’t matter if I was using the market-dominating behemoth that was Netscape Navigator or the scrappy, fringe-niche new kid Internet Explorer: very little seemed to line up with the specification, and almost nothing worked consistently across the browsers.

So I started creating little test pages, tackling a single property on each page with one test per value (or value type), each just a simple assertion of what should be rendered along with a copy of the CSS used on the page.  Over time, my completionist streak drove me to expand this smattering of tests to cover everything in CSS1, and the perfectionist in me put in the effort to make it easy to navigate.  That way, when a new browser version came out, I could run it through the whole suite of tests and see what had changed and make note of it.

Eventually, those tests became the CSS1 Test Suite, and the way it looks today is pretty much how I built it.  Some tests were expanded, revised, and added, plus it eventually all got poured into a basic test harness that I think someone else wrote, but most of the tests — and the overall visual design — were my work, color-blindness insensitivity and all.  Those tests are basically what got me into the Working Group as an Invited Expert, way back in the day.

Before that happened, though, with all those tests in hand, I was able to compile CSS browser support information into a big color-coded table, which I published on the CWRU web site (remember, I was Webmaster) and made freely available to all.  The support data was stored in a large FileMaker Pro database, with custom dropdown fields to enter the Y/N/P/B values and lots of fields for me to enter template fragments so that I could export to HTML.  That support chart eventually migrated to the late Web Review, where it came to be known as “the Mastergrid”, a term I find funny in retrospect because grid layout was still two decades in the future, and anyway, it was just a large and heavily styled data table.  Because I wasn’t against tables for tabular data.  I just didn’t like the idea of using them solely for layout purposes.

You can see one of the later versions of Mastergrid in the Wayback Machine, with its heavily classed and yet still endearingly clumsy markup.  My work maintaining the Mastergrid, and articles I wrote for Web Review, led to my first book for O’Reilly (currently in its fourth edition), which led to my being asked to write other books and speak at conferences, which led to my deciding to co-found a conference… and a number of other things besides.

And it all kicked off 25 years ago this month in a conference room in Paris, May 7th, 1996.  What a journey it’s been.  I wonder now, in the latter half of my life, what CSS — what the web itself — will look like in another 25 years.

• 25 Years of CSS was published on Tuesday, May 25th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the CSS, History, and Standards categories.
• There have been twelve replies.