SI26: CSS linguistics

This page develop ideas of CSS linguistics, prescriptive and descriptive, in the context of XPUB Declaration special issue.

Standard means blurry and frictions

CSS is a standard, meaning its edges are blurry. CSS is a standard maintained by the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). At its core, CSS is a set of recommendations, suggesting how things should be interpreted. Coming from dreams of accessibility and openness, it leaves the freedom to each software to follow or deviate from the standard. History -- notably the "the browser wars" - showed that there are divergences about which logic should dictate its evolution. Preferences of default styling, properties considered superfluous and thus removed (haikon lee CSS region), or unofficial ones forced in the standard. Knowing whether it makes sense to use a properties has became its own science, culminating in the well-named website Can I use. Technical decisions lead to cultural impact. We can only imagine how the choices of what makes it to the CSS standard could have redefined our attention to various visual elements, its impacts on our lives expanding far outside of the screens space. Therefore it seems fundamental for Declarations to ask what are the power dynamics, as well cultural positioning, at play in the CSS standard? Who are the actors of this political ecosystem and what are their motivations?

One the desire of Declarations is to create a corpus and network of meaningfull CSS artistic practices as a tool to enter in conversation with the standard itself. Through transdisciplinarity, it tries to not only speak from a designer or publisher POV, but look at the work of artists, amateur, people with literary background, cultural studies, poets and hackers. The research wishes to enter in conversation with W3C people, and maybe have a seat at their table, but from a different perspective: one that is not only motivated by the technics of certain properties but also by the meaning of the words.

Inline-block fable

A little fable that show the linguistic nature of the CSS web-language in a curious way is the one of inline-block.

It can be easy for an educated web-developer to describe what is display: block;: well, they are big block that take all width, they stack vertically and take only the necessary height they need. Same apply for display: inline;: well, they are lines of text, going from left to right or right to left, and whenever there is no space left to write the next character, it flows to the next line. But let's try to explain with the same simple language what is display: inline-block;? Much harder.

However, that doesn't prevent us to use it. In fact, the same educated web-developer might know exactly when and where to use it in order to produce a desired result in terms of design, because they saw it in use by other and learn with instinct and try and error how and when to use it. It is very similar to how we learn to use natural language: we hear people say some words, and at some point we can use them in sentences, but that doesn't mean we can define them as one would do in a dictionnary, or as an ethymologist, or as a linguist. Our instinctive but limited understanding of inline-block highlight to me how CSS is really a language that we "speak" and "learned" by using-making the web.

In the special issue we will try to deconstruct this instinct and take the role of linguist. We will ask ourselves: "Wait, what does inline-block actually mean?".

Prescriptive and descriptive

"Linguistic prescription is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language, including rules of spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society or sector of a society perceives as a correct or proper form, or advise on effective and stylistically apt communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change; if radical, it may produce neologisms. Such prescription may be motivated by attempts to improve the consistency of language to make it more "logical"; to improve the rhetorical effectiveness of speakers; to align with the prescriber's aesthetics or personal preference; to impose linguistic purity on a language by removing foreign influences; or to avoid causing offense (i.e. for etiquette or political correctness).

Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with the descriptive approach of academic linguistics, which observes and records how language is actually used (while avoiding passing judgment). The basis of linguistic research is text (corpus) analysis and field study, both of which are descriptive activities. Description may also include researchers' observations of their own language usage. In the Eastern European linguistic tradition, the discipline dealing with standard language cultivation and prescription is known as "language culture" or "speech culture"."

- Wikipedia, Linguistic prescription

During the special issue, we will not only learn to make webpage with CSS, but also look at both:

• prescriptive side of CSS: the standard by the W3C, and its evolution
• descriptive side of CSS: the cultural use of CSS by amateur & designer over the evolution of the web