Still surprised it took so long. Feels like the folks working on CSS have some really weird prioritites when it comes to deciding what to work on and what to add.
Vertical centering has been trivial in numerous ways for many years. At least since flexbox. This is mostly a convenience to achieve what flexbox already did, with a simpler (albeit more error prone) imposition on document structure.
With that in mind, which “really weird priorities” would you have deprioritized relative to this convenience?
I don't think it's fair to dismiss something as "convenience". Convenience is very important in development, convenience is the reason we use CSS to begin with.
The idea of centering an element within another is extremely basic. Something someone might want to do literally within the first 30 minutes of touching CSS for the first time and historically that person, who probably expected some evident answer instead found a 5000 vote post in stackoverflow with information on flexbox, margin auto, text align and half a dozen hacks for different situations.
Like I can do a js implementation of array.has() in a couple of minutes. I would still be shocked if it was never implemented by default and it got implemented now.
All of what you say is reasonable, as written. But I also don’t think it’s fair to characterize my comment as dismissing convenience. I think “really weird priorities” is a strong claim, and I think it deserves perspective and warrants questioning.
I'm also frequently surprised at how long certain CSS features take to implement. Some recent examples for me are the `has:()` pseudo selector [1], the scripting media queries [2], and css nesting [3].
The `scripting` @media query isn't very useful. If you want CSS that's in effect when the browser doesn't have JavaScript, you can put those styles inside <noscript>. More commonly, use JavaScript itself to add or remove a class that is used within the relevant selectors. Only using JavaScript itself is potentially effective when script-blocking extensions are used rather than JavaScript not being available at all.
`:has()` is very clever, powerful, and has been desired for a long time. However, even if someone figured out how to implement it twenty years ago, it probably still couldn't have been used for performance reasons.
CSS nesting may have also been infeasible for performance reasons.
> The `scripting` @media query isn't very useful. If you want CSS that's in effect when the browser doesn't have JavaScript, you can put those styles inside <noscript>.
If your styles are defined within external stylesheets, then having to extract them from their respective stylesheets and place them directly in a noscript DOM node is not very ergonomic (and it will also affect your ability to cache those styles, since they're now a part of your potentially dynamically generated HTML rather than a static stylesheet).
> use JavaScript itself to add or remove a class that is used within the relevant selectors.
Well yeah, If you're ok with adding JS then most native CSS features can be polyfilled. This is a very imperative solution to a problem that the scripting media query handles declaratively. I would much rather have my styles dictated by my stylesheets, and reserve my JS for adding interactivity.
> However, even if someone figured out how to implement it twenty years ago, it probably still couldn't have been used for performance reasons.
Yeah the has selector is similar to a lookahead assertion in a regular expression, and CSS nesting is similar to a lookbehind (both of which can be computationally expensive). I'm not sure browsers needed to wait until the 2020s to deliver these features though. I would have loved to ditch SASS and SCSS years ago.
When the CSS is only to be used when JavaScript runs, I'm okay with using JavaScript to make it active. Again, the media query only does its thing when the browser says JavaScript isn't supported, if the page's JavaScript doesn't run because the .js file was blocked or there was a network issue, you get the "JavaScript styles" without the JavaScript.
Yes, there's probably been enough device performance to handle things like :has() and CSS nesting for a while. Another factor may have been IE; as long as there was a browser that wouldn't add features but still had to be supported, interest in expanding CSS spec in ways that couldn't easily rely on CSS parsers ignoring code they don't understand may have been limited.
> Again, the media query only does its thing when the browser says JavaScript isn't supported
I get how it works, it just feels like a hack designed to work around a missing feature, rather than the ideal way to handle the problem. Phrased another way: if the scripting media query was ubiquitous I would never go back to toggling classes via JS.
> Another factor may have been IE;
Browsers have been shipping features that don't work in IE for the better part of the last decade. If you think CSS nesting would break IE, imagine what IE would do when it encounters a modern JS feature that can't be polyfilled like Proxies.
> if the scripting media query was ubiquitous I would never go back to toggling classes via JS
I am asserting that in the majority of cases where a person's browser is not running a page's JavaScript, it is because of a network failure or intentional blocking, neither of which can be detected by the media query.
Therefore, three years from now when the media query will be ubiquitous, it won't prevent your styles that are meant to be used only with your JavaScript from being used most of the time.
The `@media (scripting: none)` query absolutely can detect if a user has disabled JS on the page via their browser's settings (e.g. via chrome://settings/content/javascript). If you mean to say that it can't detect when a third party extension has disabled scripts, well then I would say that's personally out of scope for me. Extensions can do all sorts of nefarious things, the least of which is disable JS. As far as network reliability is concerned, if the user can't download fonts, media files, stylesheets, scripts, and linked pages, then toggling classes is probably the least of my concerns.
