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Things I wish I’d known about CSS

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Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#171
here is the greatest thing i learned about css just last week:

.container { display: flex; align-items: flex-start; }

OMG!!! where have you been my whole life you little flex darling :)

you have no idea how much trouble and pain it is to align elements that are table cells.

https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/a/align-items/

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#172

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…

I looked at the one with glass and lemon and I want to cry. It's just crazy how much some people push things. I wonder how long it took though..

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#173
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…

Cobbler here, currently cobbling a frontend (am a backend dev by trade). The issue for me is the format these courses and resources take. CSS is the most jam packed with non-intuitive technology I've met. How many dozens of pages or segments of video would I have to go through in a course to learn what the author in OP summarised in two or three sentences? Any time I've considered the structured approach for somethin…

I had the same perspective on these frontend technologies as a backend/ops guy, and it all finally clicked when it came to me that I just couldn't find a justification for why CSS was the way it was.

This was solved trivially by just reading the history of CSS. It was shocking to finally have made clear all of the quirks and weird aspects of CSS that always made it difficult for me to connect the dots and feel myself lost in a messy tangled up language.

By far the best source I went through was found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22215931 - it's a long read, but extremely enlightening!

https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS20/history.html was also useful.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#174
post #153
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.

Learning by course is generally good (rust book!), but "overlearning" certainly exists in all technologies. I've been hanging out in freenode's ##learnpython for years helping noobs, and I can't count how many times I've met the scenario of a new programmer working their way methodically and studiously through a 2k page book, stuck on page 1643, because they haven't actually grasped concepts from page 20. They'll be all kinds of worried about how to correctly use slots and metaclasses, when they can't write even basic functions.

CSS suffers massively from this info overload.

What I tell every new programmer who will listen, is that they should first grasp the absolute basic building blocks, and then learn to read the docs. That's really all you need. Unless the particular language or technology their are using sucks, you can essentially compose anything from the basics. Once you've done that, the sortcuts and sugar you learn naturally actually make sense, rather than appear before you as spooky magic boxes and incantations.

My ideal CSS course would just be the absolute basics of syntax and concepts, a primer on understanding and incorporating information from the docs, and then an index of well organised resources, such as the OP's.

This way, it's impossible to overload, and I'm left in a state where I can expand at my own personal rate. Anything that tries to set the pace for you is going to be suboptimal for 99% of readers.

Furthermore, anything that flows easily and without extremely explicit DO NOT PASS GO UNTIL YOU ARE EXCELLENT AT THE LAST CHAPTER, will lead to overload. You can't overload if you don't provide the information one can overload with. Simply ending your course after the basics and docs, absolutely guarantees against this problem. "Leave the learner in a known good state", would be my rule of thumb.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I mixed up. I edit it. Still, €61k isn't an average salary. An engineer reaches that after about 10-15 years (from personal experience and some statistics I have access to). It's double the national median.

Wow, that's just crazy to me. It makes sense with the much stronger safety net, it's just a shock. How does rent and food costs compare to America, do you know?

Without going into numbers all I can say about US vs Europe: for people with low income,Europe is much much better. For middle class, it boils down to some difficult choices( kids, education, leisure) and is probably equal. While upper middle class or highly paid professionals have it better in the US.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#176
20 years ago knowing CSS’s inheritance and tree traversal structure was critical to finish sites that worked flawlessly across all browsers. There was a lot of beauty in it, so much so that borrowed some ideas from CSS models for the architecture of the custom template system behind the CMS that powered CNN and a number of other large media sites with many sub-properties.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#177
> Notice how it’s the odd-numbered rows with a background? Given our selector (p:nth-child(even)), we might expect the even-numbered rows to be highlighted instead.

OR it counts rows from zero instead of 1, rather than all this about siblings...

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I mixed up. I edit it. Still, €61k isn't an average salary. An engineer reaches that after about 10-15 years (from personal experience and some statistics I have access to). It's double the national median.

Wow, that's just crazy to me. It makes sense with the much stronger safety net, it's just a shock. How does rent and food costs compare to America, do you know?

I'm in Scotland, my salary is about £45-£48k. I take home about £31k.

The median salary here is about £21k nationwide.

I bought my home for £170k, now worth about £230k. it's a decent sized apartment in a nice area in the city where I work. For an indication of size, my living room is about 23ft by 28ft, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms.

Some photos to show what I got for my money:

https://imgur.com/gallery/6oNLRtl

My outgoings each month average out to around £1200k. Mortgage is under £450 a month.

Healthcare is all free, university is free, prescriptions are free.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#179
post #177

> Notice how it’s the odd-numbered rows with a background? Given our selector (p:nth-child(even)), we might expect the even-numbered rows to be highlighted instead. OR it counts rows from zero instead of 1, rather than all this about siblings...

That was my thinking as well.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the United States, you can spend 6k on health insurance and 12k out of pocket for unlimited family health care. So as long as a US job pays 18k more, it's pretty similar. People talk about vacation, but my job pays so much I'll take months off between contracts. (Engineering) Also it's hard to compare lifestyles in the US vs Europe. Homes in the US are gigantic, often newish, and have Air Conditioning. Cars in the…

I'm sure in terms of money, working in the US as an IT person is a good deal. But you have to think not only about you but also the others. I don't know whether you have children or grandchildren , but if you do I'm sure knowing that they will never have a bad situation is pretty nice. You can't expect all your children and grandchildren to have a well paid job and you can't finance all of them forever.

Workforce mobility means people can always move for a system that makes more sense for them. If grandpa was a good IT engineer and made some nice money in US, but the grandchild is the village idiot then moving to Germany or France is a solution. Germany has an open door policy to foreigners (there are millions of Turkish descendants of "guest workers" invited after WW2 for reconstruction), East Europeans and now "refugees" from all over Middle East and Africa. No idea how immigration works in France, but there are huge Magrebian communities and lots of other foreigners as well, so I think it is doable.
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