Ask HN: Is it just me, or is CSS too damn hard?

CSS is not hard. Design is hard. Putting a technical barrier between yourself and a decent design makes designing a little harder. But CSS is just obscuring a really tough problem. One thing that makes CSS seem tough is its incompatibility with the design process. A "simple" design change can mean many many lines of CSS or CSS that is simply incompatible with existing CSS/HTML structure. The best CSS writers I've known all have backgrounds in design/art. It's a long term play, but I'd say invest in learning to design. Forget about CSS for a while.

As anything, CSS requires practice. Imagine writing Haskell after having experience only with Python or C — you will probably expect it to be different — and difficult. You will probably want to read a book or two about Haskell, going from the first principles to real-world programs. Starting directly with real-world problems in Haskell will probably leave you frustrated and confused.

Perhaps you were never interested in CSS, and never gave it much thought; but it too has its own basic principles, after learning which it will be easy to say, like you want: "hey, CSS, this is the parent div, and all child divs must obey its size".

Yes, it is horrible. It's got a little bit better (think flexbox and CSS grid) but it still feels clumsy, unintuitive, unpredictable, inelegant, frustrating. You learn to live with all it's painful shortcomings, but you'll never learn to like or love it.

Interesting aside: what would the creators of CSS do differently today?

Bert Bos:

- Feels there was too little detail in the first CSS spec (but Håkon Wium Lie thinks there wasn't enough)

- Wishes there were more ways to display link behaviour e.g. expanding/collapsing text

- He wanted to create CSS syntax that was readable for people who were not programmers

- He preferred a full stop (period) to mark the end of a group of statements. Curly brackets (braces) to group statements was Tim Berner-Lee's idea.

- Grids should have been a fundamental part of the CSS spec from the beginning

- Prefers the idea of CSS for documents and a separate language for UI elements

- Thinks the cascade could have been made easier

Håkon Wium Lie:

- Feels there was too much detail in the first spec: the more you added to the spec, the harder it became to implement

- Thinks that margin collapsing was too complicated for v1 and could have been dropped

- Also thinks first-letter and first-sentence pseudo-elements should have been left out of v1

- Hypercard was based on the idea of cards rather than documents - he wished a CSS card element had been defined

- He didn't want border radius originally, but designers insisted and he now likes it

- The v1 spec was written without any test documents - he considers that a major mistake

- They both approached CSS in a document frame of mind and wonders if they should have considered the idea of web apps more

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQTpsxf7rQQ

> Incidentally, but very likely related, I always failed to have any glimpse into how design works. I have no idea which colors "go" with which ones, and pretty much all fonts look like the same for me.

This is not related. There is no magic or natural connection between grokking CSS and having a sense for color theory or typography. They are connected by circumstance only, in that they're all useful for web design, and in that CSS can control colors and typography in the web browser. CSS is not any more an "art" thing than Javascript or C, although it is a thing with which one can make art (as are Javascript and C).