It's baffling just how complex CSS became over the years. I wonder, is the extra work involved for all the relative tracking something to consider for website performance?
It's baffling just how complex CSS became over the years
Well, except for calc(), these cases seems to come all from CSS 1.
Interestingly, the font-size section mentioned how a font may be sized in a VR environment. I remember VRML, but didn't know there were plans to apply CSS to VR back then!
Even before CSS 1... Initially CSS tried to emulate what was available in "presentational HTML" available at the time. The absolute and relative font sizes were introduced by the FONT-element and BASEFONT-element, and the BIG and SMALL elements.
Re: perf tips for authors: I don't think so, the tracking is pretty central to fundamental features of fonts (i.e. the default font size)
I guess using absolute font sizes as close to the top of the DOM tree as possible will help a tiny bit. But it also means that folks with custom default font size settings wont have the settings get respected.
I think this has a pretty minor perf impact overall as well.
It's baffling just how complex CSS became over the years. I wonder, is the extra work involved for all the relative tracking something to consider for website performance?