Yeah the signal slot wording probably does come from interactions with QT.

I don’t know why the myth that CSS flow-based layouts are always better than tables is still around – I’m assuming it was to prevent horrible rendering performance on sites that use hundreds of nested tables to lay things out. CSS table layouts actually are inappropriate / unnecessary in many places where simple tables do make sense – with the caveat that you shouldn’t abuse them. (hence it being easier to say don’t use them than explain that using too many is also bad) You can actually accomplish a great deal in HTML without using any css or embedded style directives at all. The opposite can not be said of CSS.

Either way adding some CSS support for laying out Swing stuff sounds like a fun idea.

Rendering hints are a term I’ve possibly mis-used to describe how many c++ based gui toolkits have common good “default” behaviors for things where the default set of components/layout managers tend to make you angry. Such as knowing that a JList almost always wants to fill the space it is placed in. (when that same sensible default layout logic is applied to all components it starts to make the toolkit more pleasurable to use – ie doing what developers want/expect vs. whatever is academically / backwards compatibly correct – as is a common issue with java related technologies in general)

I of course do think highly of Swing in general – my point was meant to focus more on web browser rendering abstractions being a far far cry from Swing / desktop GUI toolkit rendering abstractions – esp when it comes to building and composing multiple “things” in a view and how they interact and effect each others layout and what is really important in web development at the end of the day…..which is HTML / CSS / JavaScript.