Constraint CSS | GSS
Soon after the W3C introduced Cascading Style Sheets, Greg Badros, the author of the Cassowary Constraint Solver & recently retired Facebook VP, proposed Constraint CSS (CCSS) as a general solution for CSS layout. Back in ‘99 Badros demonstrated responsive layouts with CCSS that today’s designers still can’t reproduce without grinding out piles of JavaScript. For more than a decade, no one seemed to take notice outside of academia until Apple implemented Cassowary & Greg’s pioneering concepts in its new AutoLayout engine with the launch of OS X Lion. Despite the evolutionary leap for app developers, web designers have had to settle with float-based & table-based layouts that have remained unimproved to this day.
“We should contemplate how very, very far behind the web platform is in making it delightful to build the sorts of things that are work-a-day in native environments.” Alex Russell
The foundation of GSS is a modernized implementation of CCSS on which we build more exotic layout APIs can and are accomplished.
