Hacker News Reader

Comment by fzeindl | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why CSS would not just adopt Apple's Autolayout and be done with it: I want to specify that this space should be equal to that space, these borders to grow, and those borders to shrink and this point always aligned to that point.

It is simple, intuitive, it works for all cases. Instead we are inventing, what, the fifth generation of CSS-layouting now? Does nobody think this is odd?

View on HN

> it works for all cases

It's only a fixed 2d arrangement. It isn't any more expressive than the CSS table layout or position absolute+relative combos. It has no ability to react to size constraints in any other way than naive stretching and hitting min-width hard. It can't do anything "responsive" like wrapping items to the next line, or switching a grid from 1x6 to 2x3.

You can't make masonry in autolayout constraints, other than precomputing specific constraints for every item, which won't automatically reflow the items to a new container width.

It’s difficult to unambiguously and usefully specify what should happen when not all constraint can be fulfilled. And you can likely also DOS browsers by exponentially exploding constraint calculations. CSS is bad as a layout system, but I also don’t like constrained-based layout systems unless they enforce that the constraints can always be fulfilled and be calculated in reasonable time. Which implies that you wouldn’t be able to change the layout willy-nilly client-side with JavaScript.

Checking that the layout isn‘t exponentially complex and DOSing the browser could be a simple task for the web developer. If you want your website to perform bad you can always find a way.

The concern is about adversarial content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com