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Things I wish I’d known about CSS

cssfordesigners.com

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Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#81

Post by techbubble »

_the_inflator wrote: post #33
paozac wrote: post #17

Useful article. Getting started with CSS must be harder these days than it was 15-20 years ago. Not only for mobile-friendliness, but also because of the coexistence of flexbox/grid/traditional layouts. I'm wondering if the standard will ever been simplified, instead of being added more and more features.

CSS and HTML are constantly evolving, and so its demands. However for me CSS is way more straight-forward than in the 90th and 00th. The standards addressed a lot of the pains and struggles we had with floats/clearfix etc. This was challenging but nothing im comparison to supporting IE 6-9, FF, Safari, Opra etc. at the time. Also hacking in JavaScript added to the complexity. Nowadays I can do with 10 lines of grid a…

"div soup" – I like that.

The present-day CSS frameworks use "class soup."

For example, tailwind (which I like):

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#82

Post by jitendrac »

That is really useful.

I have been writing small html front-ends since 2008-09. HTML5,CSS3 made many things easier like gradients, Round borders, and many things that now developer do takes as granted. I clearly remember, how boring and frustrating it was to slice borders and corners from photoshop psd.

CSS3 and HTML5 made many good changes, but new css feature like grid, Flex-box all are still confusing. I have to look at the references every time I start new frontend work.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#83

Post by dwd »

techbubble wrote: post #59

This was a great article and I learned a few new tricks. I learned CSS over the years by gradually solving problems I encountered building apps. Compare this to people learning CSS now as evidenced by the #100DaysOfCode tag on Twitter. The learning technique is comprised primarily of using gradient-heavy, absolutely positioned HTML elements to create a photo-realistic, 3D rendering of objects. The results are pretty…

Some pseudo elements, a gradient and some transforms and you can do some really cool stuff. Highly recommend learning how to use these effectively:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/background-...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/transform-o...

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#84

Post by PetahNZ »

gorgoiler wrote: post #63

It feels like HTML and CSS could be useful for print layout, but I’ve rarely seen a high quality PDF renderer. I know Atom’s markdown preview uses headless chrome under the hood. These are hugely heavyweight tools but the output is very high quality. Are there any other recommended tools for going an HTML route, for typesetting? I’d much rather design pages that way than use InDesign, PDF scripting, or TeX.

Although not exactly what you want, my day job is basically implementing systems that take SVG's produced in design tools, pipe them through to a customer UI for designing print books, posters etc, then renders high res images server side with Chrome headless and finally sending them off to the printer. SVG does a great job, but still requires a lot of coding for laying out the text, line breaks, pages, etc.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#85

Post by bobmaxup »

miiiiiike wrote: post #65
jb1991 wrote: post #31

Yikes. I've been earning 6 figures as of about two years ago doing mostly HTML and CSS UI design for a bank. And I still did not know about many of these! I guess they are things I wish I'd known about CSS! Better late than never I guess.

I've never been happy with a front-end dev that I've paid six-figures to. I once paid a senior front-end engineer far too much to do a fairly involved layout. Three months, an uncountable number of bugs, and one unusable tangle of Sass later I pulled the plug and swore off ever hiring a "CSS Person" again. I took the Linus+Git approach and said "I'm not writing another line of Python until I understand CSS." After a…

I too have worked with many front-end developers that were book and spec averse who preferred to gather lore from various gurus in three paragraph blurbs.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#86

Post by ChrisRR »

speedgoose wrote: post #40
ChrisRR wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Six figures? In the US? Sometimes I wonder why companies even pay developers so much in the US. I'm a specialised medical embedded software developer in the UK and I'm not even halfway to six figures, and will likely never hit it. It astounds me that companies don't hire twice as many non-US developers for the same price and get more work for their money. Note, I'm not talking about outsourcing to the absolute cheape…

The US salaries in IT are huge, but you need to take into account that they have to pay a lot to have a quality of life comparable to what a minimum wage worker is getting in west Europe. If you have a few kids, I would bet you are not that bad in UK with one fewer digit.

I know the difference to the cost of living in the US in silicon valley, of course not everyone lives in areas like that.

But I'm talking from the employer side, not the employee and why they would employ US devs who cost twice as much

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#87

Post by umaar »

techbubble wrote: post #78
umaar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt CSS in a similar way. I'd take Photoshop designs and try to recreate them in vanilla HTML + CSS: https://jsfiddle.net/umaar/YNA5V/ https://jsfiddle.net/umaar/fu4TT/ I'd even make 3d graphics of things like the HTML5 logo: https://i.imgur.com/kuEYpSV.png I posted this all to a community called "Forrst" (think of it like twitter, but curated for developers and designers). I spent time giving feedback on other…

I like what you have done with the site — very simple and easy to check out the tips. I subscribed.

Hey thanks for that appreciate it. Yes not spending time on fancy things/random enhancements let's me actually focus on creating new content.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#88

Post by ChrisRR »

runawaybottle wrote: post #57
ChrisRR wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Six figures? In the US? Sometimes I wonder why companies even pay developers so much in the US. I'm a specialised medical embedded software developer in the UK and I'm not even halfway to six figures, and will likely never hit it. It astounds me that companies don't hire twice as many non-US developers for the same price and get more work for their money. Note, I'm not talking about outsourcing to the absolute cheape…

There is probably more to the story here. If you’re only at about 50k, you’re making $24 an hour. There’s even cheaper labor than you. It’s going to be a disgusting race to the bottom if we start paying everyone 20, 18, 15 ... dollars an hour. At this point in my life you would have to pay me around six figures for me to do CSS seriously on a daily basis (and it’s likely I’ll still burn out and leave). The cross brow…

If you think CSS is tedious, then you've never dealt with medical device regulations. cross browser testing will seem like an absolute breeze. If a UK employer were paying £90k for CSS, absolutely everybody and their dog would be applying for a job that pays double a typical dev salary.

I think we've already experienced the race to the bottom and come out the other side, with $24 being fairly average for the world and the US being on the high side. This all happened years bacj when companies started outsourcing development and IT to India at rock bottom prices, but then received a lot of low-quality work (you get what you pay for). I believe India has a much different approach to software quality than many other countries.

It's taken many companies years to realise that mistake, but I wouldn't call $24 a race to the bottom for skilled labour as that will land you comfortably above average income in the UK

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#89

Post by continuational »

chmod775 wrote: post #16
continuational wrote: post #13

> Using pixels (px) is tempting because they’re simple to understand: declare font-size: 24px and the text will be 24px. But that won’t provide a great user experience, particularly for users who resize content at the browser level or zoom into content. Pixels (px) in CSS are relative as well, and scale with zoom. What is the benefit of em/rem?

>What is the benefit of em/rem? They (em*) scale with the element's font size, and if you set an elements font-size itself in em, that will be relative to the parent element's font size. For example: body { font-size: 18px } .something { border: 0.1em solid black; } .something > .inner { font-size: 1.5em } If you change the font-size on body, everything on that page will re-scale seamlessly. This is most useful for t…

Ok, I can kinda see the value of that - e.g. if you put a "tag button" inside some text, it will have the right size in relation to that text.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#90

Post by indigochill »

nanna wrote: post #39
christophilus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is going to happen. Big corporations are finally waking up to 1st class remote work, and that’s the gateway to lower US wages. I say this as a remote worker, and a huge fan of remote work. But I do think the high US salaries are going to mean revert a bit.

Sounds to me like tech workers in the US should join a union, and quick!

Now, admittedly I'm a skeptic of unions by default (in my view they're mostly just another layer of bureaucracy/waste), but isn't unionization of tech workers in the US the quickest way to make themselves even less desirable?

Why hire a US union member when you can hire an Eastern European who both works for peanuts and doesn't have union hang-ups? (Admittedly outsourcing has its own problems, especially when there are language/cultural barriers)

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