I was catching up reading some glish this week, and one of the posts caught my eye. Your CSS Bores Me is an interesting article by Chris Casciano; he poses the question: why is there seemingly so little visual creativity in CSS design? Eric responds that there are still significant barriers due to broken and uneven CSS capabilities in the various browsers. He then wonders why that with such limitations, people aren’t more creative when in other cases design becomes more creative in the face of limitation.
My take on it? CSS does not benefit from this limitation issue because the limitations do not deal primarily with the medium (as in the CSS ‘vocabulary’ itself, although in the case of CSS1 and to a lesser degree CSS2, there certainly are limitations within the language), but rather we’re talking about bugs. Annoying, annoying bugs. Quite frankly, they’re annoying to work around. In all the mediums that Chris mentions (Flash, Shockwave, static images, PDF), the designers do not have to deal with instability in the actual presentation medium. When creating advanced (technical/programmatic) works in client-side web technologies (CSS, DOM), one spends more times working around implementation bugs and with poorly documented interfaces, etc. than with real stuff.
My comparison is, well, would anything have been written if C compilers were as bad as web browsers in correctness? If you think about it that way, it’s just ridiculous. I suspect that’s why many more technical-minded developers have moved towards creating interesting back-end tools. Imagine an environment where you can experiment and play and with code you write that actually runs and works like it’s supposed to. Well, if these people are moving away to more stable platforms (whether it be PHP or (I hate to say it, but it’s true) ActionScript), then who’s left to push CSS and the DOM? Oh, and don’t push too hard, because it’ll break. And all the cool stuff? Yeah, that’s not implemented yet, in fact lots of cool and useful stuff isn’t even defined yet.
Maybe people just realized they have better things to do with their time? Like finding gainful employment.
[neuralust is pretty cool; Chris’ explanation.]