Things I wish I’d known about CSS • Hacker News Board

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#151

Post by bouncycastle » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #131

bouncycastle wrote: post #74

These would be great interview questions! "So, you've been doing CSS since 1999. Please tell me how the width/height of a box is calculated?"

Me: "In which browser?"

Ahh, yes.. who remembers "Quirksmode"?

Sadly, everything has to follow Webkit these days...

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#152

Post by pantaloony » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #139

benhurmarcel wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an official simulator for France: https://mon-entreprise.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-net It's not 100% accurate (the exact amounts depend on many variables) but gives a good idea. For example, a cost to the employer of USD 100k (87460€/year) gives a before-taxes salary of USD 70.5k, and a salary after all taxes of USD 47k.

> before-taxes salary of USD 70.5k, and a salary after all taxes of USD 47k. What!? That's over 30% of your income gone, and for a relatively average income. That's not even counting VAT and other taxes.... No wonder there's so much "free" stuff in Europe.

Notably, I doubt you could get family healthcare coverage in the US that reduced your financial risk as much as France’s does for under $25,000/yr. Even at that rate I bet your exposure’s still worse.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#153

Post by im3w1l » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #126

It always helped me to do an absolute basic concepts course on a new technology I learn. Like, sure I can play around in Photoshop or Eclipse or CSS or JavaScript and find most things. But a good 101 course is worth so much saved time. Most of the stuff in that article was mentioned in a CSS box model course I did 10 years ago. People were always baffled how I learned all this. Well, I read the docs! They always assu…

I'm kinda curious how the long term viability of these strategies look. Intuitively I think that reading the docs will become less and less viable as there are more and more available technologies and they become more and more featured. But I'm not fully convinced. Maybe it can keep working by only teaching the most important subset.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#154

Post by Wowfunhappy » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

zero_iq wrote: post #48

xanathar wrote: post #8

Ends up to a page saying "The page you requested does not exist". ...which kinda reflects "things I wish about CSS", so 10/10.

Page doesn't render correctly for me in Firefox/MacOS, so I had a similar thought... there's probably a couple of things he should add to his list! :D

Same here (and same browser/OS), it seems like some font is missing?

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#155

Post by rimliu » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

towb wrote: post #91

porker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done CSS since 1999, none of this was new to me, and I've never earned 6 figures for doing HTML and CSS. I moved my career away from HTML/CSS in order to earn more.

I think we picked up a lot more of the basics back in the days because doing CSS was much less forgiving than it is now. And the whole struggle with pixel perfect between browsers just forced you to spend hours on these tiny things.

I was also waaay more limited. All those clever hacks to get equal height columns, "sliding doors", workarounds for IE5/6/7…

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#156

Post by egfx » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

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…

You seem to be trivializing css as something static you just have to deal with. This maybe true for 99% of websites but css has had more innovation in the last few years than anything else. And much of it hasn’t reached textbooks. For example css3 functions and now being able to mix these new techniques in undiscovered ways. CSS requires a very nimble and creative mindset. That maybe why backend devs usually are very dismissive of it. By the way I became a frontend developer after I spent many years as a backend dev. My background is in Php and Perl.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#157

Post by rimliu » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

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 is way easier now when it was 15-20 years ago (source: 24 years with frontend, 22 professionaly). Alas, that's probably one of the reasons why people do not spend any effort learning it. I'd argue that 15 years ago was the golden age for CSS innovation and web standards in general. Technologies are much more powerfull now, but the attitude of those using them could use some improvement.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#158

Post by leephillips » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

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.

Modern CSS technologies such as grid are convenient for laying out webpages. But there can be no “high quality PDF renderer” from HTML/CSS. The result will always look as crude as a web page. In order to produce a high quality document, you need a sophisticated line breaking algorithm such as that deployed by TeX or some other software.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#159

Post by Someone1234 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

erichurkman wrote: post #123

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.

A true CSS+HTML-powered print renderer is PrinceXML. https://www.princexml.com/samples/ Having used it for over a decade, it's a wonderful tool.

That product's license tiers are a complete non-starter, unprofessional, and they "call for pricing" on the only potentially usable license (but don't provide a copy of the CSO License for review before calling).

> A Prince Server License can be installed on a single server to produce PDF documents for company-internal use, or documents that are made available to everyone free of charge.

They never define what "company-internal use" means, even in the actual terms[0]. This was clearly written by a non-lawyer, and any company worth its salt wouldn't touch this (the "FAQ" isn't a legally binding document, and even that is incredibly vague/unhelpful).

> You many not use Prince to generate documents that are part of a Commerial Service, for example invoices and monthly statements.

So "company-internal use" doesn't include order/remittance/invoice/receipt to your company's suppliers/vendors? That's just bizarre, the whole licensing is. The "Service License" feels like a Honey Trap.

[0] https://www.princexml.com/license/

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#160

Post by rimliu » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

_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…

Btw, there is an effort to have modern-day CSS zen garden: https://stylestage.dev