Great read, a related and entertaining CSS talk is CODE GENIUS - Cascading Shit Show by Jacob Thornton
Why is CSS the way it is?
11–20 of 173 posts
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://css-tricks.com/almanac/selectors/o/only-child/ The :only-child pseudo-class selector property in CSS represents an element that has a parent element and whose parent element has no other element children. on edit: sorry I got confused and dropped your requirement to select the parent.
Yes but you cannot select the parent p which is what they were talking about.
ah you're right, I misread.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#13I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…
Give me better composition options with css. I will love it. Until then, it is a toxic relationship. I have to use a preprocessor for that and it increases the time to see feedback from the browser.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't work out the logical consequences of seemingly obvious properties. That is unlike 95% of most programming I do in any programming language I've ever used. Since I have zero interest in learning unintuitive interfaces to GUI design, I have zero interesting in excusing CSS. It is not difficult to learn, it is not difficult to understand in terms of conceptual understanding, it is downright tedious to learn th…
> You can't work out the logical consequences of seemingly obvious properties. Could you expand on this a little / give an example?
Given my thoughts (and recent experience) was shaped by something like Elm-UI - see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie-gqwSHQr0
If you have the time to learn CSS, you have the time to learn anything else. ;)
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't work out the logical consequences of seemingly obvious properties. That is unlike 95% of most programming I do in any programming language I've ever used. Since I have zero interest in learning unintuitive interfaces to GUI design, I have zero interesting in excusing CSS. It is not difficult to learn, it is not difficult to understand in terms of conceptual understanding, it is downright tedious to learn th…
> it is not difficult to understand in terms of conceptual understanding So what is your point? What you lack is motivation to make things pretty so it's not CSS's fault :)
My point is that there's nothing in CSS that's exceedingly difficult to understand once you sit down to learn it - it's that you're often sitting down to learn things that are entirely idiosyncratic to CSS and act as impediments to creating anything beautiful. I could abandon CSS and use SVG to create prettier things pretty quickly, because although SVG has some gnarly parts, programmatically manipulated it makes much more sense. CSS is designed to solve different problems to the ones I often want to solve in isolation - i.e. it's document oriented as opposed to element oriented, if that makes sense. Then I'm dealing with the interaction of specific elements and document flow and everything is liable to fall apart the second some mismatch between my mental model of layouts and CSS's actual model occurs. At least it's getting better, as gradual as it is.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#16I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…
Give me better composition options with css. I will love it. Until then, it is a toxic relationship. I have to use a preprocessor for that and it increases the time to see feedback from the browser.
Don't get me wrong, of course if you'd ask me whether I could envision something better and more elegant than CSS I would immediately have ideas in the back of my mind — however if you'd tell me I'd be stuck with CSS as it is my response would probably be a neutral shrug. It could be better, but it is okay and the direction things are going (CSS variables, Grids, ...) are not too bad either.
People who call it horrible in my experience often just didn't really take the time to learn it properly. For me to handwrite the CSS for a normal sized personal blog takes maybe 6 hours if I do it from scratch with mobile support etc and most of the time goes into little design adjustments that have nothing to do with CSS. As I said: to me it is not great, but it doesn't really get into my way too much either.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#17I don't get it ... for me CSS is very easy. It's logic and clear. But yes you have to learn and work with it. It's ok ... so not everybody can master it drive-by and call themselfs an expert.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#18I have a weird relationship regarding CSS: I kinda like it (although some things could be even a bit more powerful), yet everybody I meet tells me how horrible and hard etc it is. I never had that feeling at all, not even back when I started using it as a teenager to customise my MySpace site. I cursed at how hard common things like centering a image within a div were, I cursed at the purposeful and ignorant incompat…
There's the experimental :has pseudo-class which appears to be doing what you want [1].
Personally, I'm against adding any more complexity to CSS, though; and :has fundamentally changes the locality/algorithmics and complexity of CSS selector matching. I think if the goal of CSS was to bring good-enough styling to the masses, it has utterly failed to so, yet has left a legacy of overcomplicated and badly specified ad-hoc styling rules that don't compose to a reasonable whole. CSS is what you get if you're starting with a disruptive mindset at a welcoming phase in an innovation cycle, then just can't stop to add features. I personally know several graphic artists who did fantastic professional animations using sprites (and also Flash), yet couldn't make sense of CSS, at all. To become proficient in CSS, you need years of learning a non-type-checked and bogus hell of half-assed and half-implemented bloat. As a Comp.Sci. nerd, I also question the notion (ie nonsense) that "HTML is for structural semantics, and CSS for presentation"; the reality is that HTML, it being based on SGML, has excellent support for vocabulary evolution. I mean, look at CSS: it's an item-value syntax (sans the selector part). In which world does it it make sense that, starting from generic markup with lots of syntactic features (elements, attribute), to come up with yet another syntax for specifying item-values? Specifying hundreds or thousand of microsyntaxes does not an inherently procedural layout system make, and there were much better styling languages for SGML available. To adequately describe layout mechanisms, a constraint-based formalism makes much more sense.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#19Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was called Flash.
Yes, but Flash was owned by Adobe, while Flutter is owned by the same company that controls the HTML and HTTP standards, so it would be better fit.
> by the same company that controls the HTML and HTTP standards
So your solution is to dig the hole even deeper?