The Stylish Way to Style
Some noted limitations of the current capabilities of CSS include: Poor controls for flexible layouts While new additions to CSS 3 provide a stronger, more robust feature-set for layout, CSS is still at heart a styling language (for fonts, colours, borders and other decoration), not a layout language (for blocks with positions, sizes, margins, and so on). These limitations mean that creating fluid layouts generally requires hand-coding of CSS, and has held back the development of a standards-based WYSIWYG editor.[citation needed]. Selectors are unable to ascend CSS offers no way to select a parent or ancestor of an element that satisfies certain criteria. A more advanced selector scheme (such as XPath) would enable more sophisticated style sheets. However, the major reasons for the CSS Working Group rejecting proposals for parent selectors are related to browser performance and incremental rendering issues.[citation needed] Vertical control limitations While horizontal placement of elements is generally easy to control, vertical placement is frequently unintuitive, convoluted, or impossible. Simple tasks, such as centering an element vertically or getting a footer to be placed no higher than bottom of viewport, either require complicated and unintuitive style rules, or simple but widely unsupported rules.[clarification needed] Absence of expressions There is currently no ability to specify property values as simple expressions (such as margin-left: 10% – 3em + 4px;). This would be useful in a variety of cases, such as calculating the size of columns subject to a constraint on the sum of all columns. However, a working draft with a calc() value to address this limitation has been published by the CSS WG.[30] Internet Explorer versions 5 to 7 support a proprietary expression() statement,[31] with similar functionality. This proprietary expression() statement is no longer supported from Internet Explorer 8 onwards, except in compatibility modes. This decision was taken for "standards compliance, browser performance, and security reasons".[31] Lack of column declaration While possible in current CSS 3 (using the column-count module),[32] layouts with multiple columns can be complex to implement in CSS 2.1. With CSS 2.1, the process is often done using floating elements, which are often rendered differently by different browsers, different computer screen shapes, and different screen ratios set on standard monitors. Cannot explicitly declare new scope independently of position Scoping rules for properties such as z-index look for the closest parent element with a position:absolute or position:relative attribute. This odd coupling has undesired effects such as it is impossible to avoid declaring a new scope when one is forced to adjust an element's position, preventing one from using the desired scope of a parent element. Pseudo-class dynamic behavior not controllable CSS implements pseudo-classes that allow a degree of user feedback by conditional application of alternate styles. One CSS pseudo-class, ":hover", is dynamic (equivalent of javascript "onmouseover") and has potential for abuse (e.g., implementing cursor-proximity popups),[33] but CSS has no ability for a client to disable it (no "disable"-like property) or limit its effects (no "nochange"-like values for each property).
