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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I don't quite understand the issue with aspect ratio. I know there isn't a way to define it well yet, but people have been building websites for almost 30 years without a way to specify it, and now all of a sudden everyone claims to need it. It's weird.

I hope it's just evidence that CSS layout has improved to the point where 95% of the problems are effectively solved by flexbox and grid, and the upcoming subgrid, so now there's the edge cases left. Aspect ratio certainly seems to come up a lot though...

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> I don't quite understand the issue with aspect ratio. I know there isn't a way to define it well yet, but people have been building websites for almost 30 years without a way to specify it, and now all of a sudden everyone claims to need it. It's weird.

Here is a bit of background on why there is a need for aspect ratio:

https://youtu.be/AQqFZ5t8uNc?t=233

The problem with stating why "aspect ratio" is a useful concept is that people will give ways to work around it, which would totally miss the point.

This article is about the CSS standardization process, which has left much to desire. For example, it took ages before we could properly align things against the bottom of the page without hacks. The functionality of grid and flexbox has been present in TeX and most GUI tools from day 1, but somehow it took CSS more than a decade to even consider them.

The web had, and to an extent still has, a problem with no one really knowing what it's supposed to be for. A lot of people think it's for documents. And not even documents in the print sense, but "documents" as in a stream of content to be shared between computers. The early web was all about the content and how it was moved around, and very little about what it looked like. Why bother adding the ability to control how things align things to the bottom of the page if the point is simply to stream text on to a screen for someone to read the content?

The reason those things are in TeX is because Knuth was replacing typesetting for his book. He added what he needed. Browser developers did the same thing for webpages, and no one really needed to align things to the bottom of the page.

> Why bother adding the ability to control how things align things to the bottom of the page if the point is simply to stream text on to a screen for someone to read the content?

If the point was simply to stream text on to a screen for someone to read, we wouldn't need CSS to begin with.

> and no one really needed to align things to the bottom of the page.

Documents have footers. Most company webpages have useful information in their footers. I think it is reasonable that a web formatting spec offers the tools to properly format these footers. And formatting a footer is not as simple as just "adding text at the end of the content". Yet, it is also not very difficult to specify how it should properly work.

This is just another example to illustrate that the CSS standardization process has been hopelessly lagging for very straightforward use-cases.

Yet, it is also not very difficult to specify how it should properly work.

Should a footer align to the bottom of the content or the viewport or should it be sticky? Should I be able to continue content after the footer? What happens if I have a second footer element? Should the footer create a new section in the document outline? Should it display inline or as a block element? What should be the default behaviour if I print a page with a footer? Is the footer of a document the same as a footer on a website, and is that the same as the footer on a web app?

These are easy questions I can think of in 30 seconds. No doubt there are some much more complex issues too. The idea that defining a footer element for HTML is easy is nonsense.

As it is, HTML5 has had a <footer> tag for years, and it doesn't do what a document footer does. HTML5 added <header>, <main>, <section>, <aside> and more. None of them do what TeX does.

> Should ...

I just wish the CSS committee asked themselves these questions ... Like I said, it's more involved than you would expect, but on the other hand it's not rocket science, really.

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