Fresh CSS Constructs Move Web Design Beyond Ticky-Tacky Little Boxes
"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:
The World Wide Web's decades-long tyranny of box design is finally coming to an end. A new set of CSS features - including theshape() function, and the border-shape and corner-shape properties - offers web designers and their AI agents a broader palette for laying out content in a more fluid manner.
When the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published its first standard for web page layout in 1996, web sites emulated the grid-defined layouts of academic papers, newspapers, and magazines.
At the time, graphics drivers, and browser rendering engines were all in a relatively primitive state. Developers were also trying to grapple with a new medium and generally found that flowing text within a defined space was much easier when the geometric coordinates of that space were kept as simple as possible.
But now print is basically dead, webdevs are savvier (and if not, AI is happy to help), and Lord knows GPUs are more powerful. So there's no reason today why a web page has to be square, daddy-o.
In Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 proto-Sci-Fi classic Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the protagonist who lives in flat two-dimensional space is abruptly exposed to the dizzying world of three dimensions, much to his astonishment.
Web developers may experience similar emotions when they first use these new CSS constructs.
In their original forms, HTML and CSS could draw only horizontal or vertical lines or borders on a Web page. Fancier layouts required proprietary plug-ins, such as Java Applets,Macromedia/Adobe Flash, or some tedious JavaScript hacks.
SVG first broke the boxiness of the web, giving the developers the ability to put curves, squiggly lines, logos or any other wild-ass shape desired by using a series of numerical coordinates to describe the shape (it's tedious work, though image-to-SVG converters help). SVG was limited to a canvas placed on a Web page, however. CSS ruled the layout of the page itself.
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