>but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.
would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.
I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.
It's true in a case where you are doing the described thing you will need to come up with your own module system and ways to not step on other people's stuff but it isn't actually difficult. Although I have noticed some stories recently were quite big companies evidently didn't put in the work to keep from messing up other people's stuff.
Of course one drawback with that is you are also depending on developers and content managers at sites following your documentation on how to use your products, which is a different problem.
on edit: obviously if you have been writing css since 1997 and one of your first webdev jobs was this kind of thing, things were much more difficult back then. I did the same sort of thing in 2014-2015, not particularly difficult to make work. I worked web dev since 1999, first job was dynamic generation of web sites and other media from single source data.
what does this mean? Selectors are how you query a particular element to apply styles to it, I think what you mean is that selectors as a query language does not allow you to query any element from any other element the way you can with XPath but in many use cases you need to start querying globally.
but we can also see that the only way that querying from element to any other element makes sense if you could do something like (pseudo XPath / CSS abomination coming up)
which sure, I have, some very few times thought boy it would be nice if I could do more involved context selection in CSS based on an elements surrounding DOM than sibling axis and the like offer.
however
> Imagine if every variable and function in your favorite programming languages were global and so had to be unique.
yes, I know you are not saying that variables in CSS need to be global. However I think you have perhaps not internalized yet how CSS variables and scoping rules work have created a situation that allows for often elegantly solving problems that one might wish one had a more powerful query language to handle.
The following is of course not elegant, but is an example of how we change the design of .someclass based on having an ancestor mainEntry that has an empty .headline using variables.
>OK, so how do you square that with dynamic loading? Some navigation paths through an app would inject some CSS first whereas others would inject other CSS first.
yes I've run into this situation before, however for me it was a framework issue not a css standards issue, and it sounds to me with phrases like "navigation paths" and "app inject some css" that it was a JS framework that made you unhappy and not actually the state of Web standards.
D'oh! right, got lost in trying to think up a situation nowadays where you can't really do a meaningful query that takes all DOM context into account. Not sure if all edge cases are not actually handled by has and is, actually.
> However I think you have perhaps not internalized yet how CSS variables and scoping rules work have created a situation that allows for often elegantly solving problems that one might wish one had a more powerful query language to handle.
As you already said, this approach would work fine if you had no external payloads that inject their own HTML and CSS on the page, either at runtime or by being loaded by other modules in a CMS.
It also breaks when your :root selector is being polluted by overly generic variables by your platform, like in the most recent versions of Wordpress.
>If everybody wants to buy up land because "god isnt making it any more" you get less land at an even higher price which makes it even more attractive as a store in value.
Yes but people aren't trying to buy land, they are trying to buy housing, which yes, has a foundation on land but also can increase vertically without significantly increasing the land usage.
but if you don't collude during times of feast you will have famine, and during times of famine you will have famine, in an economy based on feast/famine you must sometimes feast or die.
My new startup tokencoin will blah blah blah exchange rate, (something AI writes here), 3. profit (more AI), benefiting all human kind and helping our users scale up their productive intelligence!
would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.
I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.
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