The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don’t want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like “at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page”. But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.
Would have been even better if we’d got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There’s no reason that computers can’t render beautiful text, but it’s rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.
The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don’t want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like “at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page”. But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.
Would have been even better if we’d got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There’s no reason that computers can’t render beautiful text, but it’s rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.