And exploring the tradeoffs might lead those exploring to reconsider their preferences going in.
Not directly related to the topic, but I recently did some prototyping on a second iteration of an interface with a similar tension—proliferation of similar but distinct types in a data model, or expanding the set of nuances within each existing type to support refinement within it. Going into that prototyping session, I had a very strong bias in favor of the latter. But after exploring the options, I found it vastly simpler to consume the “bloated” interface, and to reason about the resulting application code consuming it.
I don’t have strong feelings on the topic as it applies to CSS masonry, but I suspect there could be similar surprises in how people think about this tension intuitively versus in practice.
And while I think CSS in particular will have a hard time justifying “bloat” (proliferation of use case specific semantics), I think it’s possible that users do tend to find more difficulty using CSS’s denser APIs (like grid).
And exploring the tradeoffs might lead those exploring to reconsider their preferences going in.
Not directly related to the topic, but I recently did some prototyping on a second iteration of an interface with a similar tension—proliferation of similar but distinct types in a data model, or expanding the set of nuances within each existing type to support refinement within it. Going into that prototyping session, I had a very strong bias in favor of the latter. But after exploring the options, I found it vastly simpler to consume the “bloated” interface, and to reason about the resulting application code consuming it.
I don’t have strong feelings on the topic as it applies to CSS masonry, but I suspect there could be similar surprises in how people think about this tension intuitively versus in practice.
And while I think CSS in particular will have a hard time justifying “bloat” (proliferation of use case specific semantics), I think it’s possible that users do tend to find more difficulty using CSS’s denser APIs (like grid).