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8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

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31–38 of 38 posts

Re: 8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

#31
post #27

On number 3, that behavior is exactly what I would expect. Not sure what other logical behavior you would propose... The other options don't make sense: "A) Aligned horizontally with the first two, but after both of them?" Floats are taken out of the normal flow so they will be pulled as far to the side as possible until they reach another floated element or the edge of the BFC. "B) On the row after the first two, on…

I'm mostly with you, but it seems like an antipattern to ignore HTML structure like that.

It doesn't ignore HTML structure, it ends up like it does precisely because it iterates through the structure in order when moving the boxes to either side. It makes it fairly predictable if you just loop through the structure in your head and push the boxes to the side they are floated at.

Re: 8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

#32
post #27

On number 3, that behavior is exactly what I would expect. Not sure what other logical behavior you would propose... The other options don't make sense: "A) Aligned horizontally with the first two, but after both of them?" Floats are taken out of the normal flow so they will be pulled as far to the side as possible until they reach another floated element or the edge of the BFC. "B) On the row after the first two, on…

I'm mostly with you, but it seems like an antipattern to ignore HTML structure like that.

float deliberately takes elements out of content flow ("ignores HTML structure"). That's its entire thing. That's its deal. You don't want that? Don't use float.

Re: 8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

#33
post #27

On number 3, that behavior is exactly what I would expect. Not sure what other logical behavior you would propose... The other options don't make sense: "A) Aligned horizontally with the first two, but after both of them?" Floats are taken out of the normal flow so they will be pulled as far to the side as possible until they reach another floated element or the edge of the BFC. "B) On the row after the first two, on…

I'm mostly with you, but it seems like an antipattern to ignore HTML structure like that.

float deliberately takes elements out of content flow ("ignores HTML structure"). That's its entire thing. That's its deal. You don't want that? Don't use float.

Re: 8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

#34
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent, that's exactly the effect I was going for. My posts have about a 75% abandonment rate, though, so most of the people who hit the post probably won't stick around long enough to get the joke. Oh well.

The satire doesn't come across very strong and makes the author look uninformed. CSS has its ups and downs but the problems faced in the article have been known and solved for years in production environments across the web. The article is basically misleading with no answer for those unaware. Sorry if this feels harsh but reading through was fairly unpleasant.

I'm not sure if you read the entire article, but if not, I'd highly recommend persevering. The first few points seem completely and worryingly serious, but by the end it's absolutely blatant.

Re: 8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

#35
post #27

On number 3, that behavior is exactly what I would expect. Not sure what other logical behavior you would propose... The other options don't make sense: "A) Aligned horizontally with the first two, but after both of them?" Floats are taken out of the normal flow so they will be pulled as far to the side as possible until they reach another floated element or the edge of the BFC. "B) On the row after the first two, on…

It's satire. The most obvious behaviour was left out of the MCQ deliberately to frustrate the reader.

Re: 8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

#36
post #27

On number 3, that behavior is exactly what I would expect. Not sure what other logical behavior you would propose... The other options don't make sense: "A) Aligned horizontally with the first two, but after both of them?" Floats are taken out of the normal flow so they will be pulled as far to the side as possible until they reach another floated element or the edge of the BFC. "B) On the row after the first two, on…

It's satire. The most obvious behaviour was left out of the MCQ deliberately to frustrate the reader.

Well obviously it's satire, but I don't think the actual behavior was left out to frustrate the reader. The joke is that those 3 options offered would be the logical answers to the question, but the actual answer is somehow less logical than the answers offered, which I don't believe is the case.

But yes, we're probably being a little too hard on this piece, being satire and all... Then again, what else do you expect from the HN audience?

Re: 8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

#37
post #2

The one about vertical-align seems wrong. I use it all the time when aligning text next to images and that has nothing to do with tables afaik. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/vertical-al...

Yeah...I wouldn't say that "accuracy" was one of the main goals of this post per se.

Oh, sorry. I only skimmed it and missed the gist of it.

Re: 8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

#38
post #5

CSS is a bloody disgrace. A hideous abomination. Is there any word on the street, any alternatives coming down the road?

It's interesting that, in order make life livable, I don't actually write pure CSS anymore. I write Sass w/Bootstrap (and I like it). I know that it makes for a bloated stylesheet, but it beats drinking myself to death, mumbling about how the W3C failed to do their damn job.

And fail they did. Rather than hammer out an explicit standard, they just kind of winged it and left the actual implementation details to the browser builders. Those guys were never going to play nicely together, but at least we'd be able to blame someone else.

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