Why is CSS the way it is?

I think six hours is pretty good for what is a rather large task?

> broke so many things (deep linking/bookamrks, browser history, etc.)

Truly we have failed to learn from past mistakes.

My problem with CSS is not so much with its idiosyncrasies - though I still find myself getting tripped up by ::pseudo-elements when they're used for anything more than show-off quote marks.

Rather, it's with the way people use it.

For instance when working with a code base handed over to me for maintenance, it's often been the case that the code has already passed through several previous developers/companies. And a lot of those people have fixed presentational bugs over the years by adding !important rules in various places across the various CSS files that contribute to the site. It drives me nuts! Also: commenting out huge swathes of CSS code in a file, but not deleting it ... just in case it's needed again. Why??

The other thing that concerns me is the way new functionality gets added to the CSS spec. Take animations - do they belong in the CSS code, or Javascript? Yes CSS animations are (generally) faster, but the more complex the animation, the harder I find it to understand a CSS implementation. And it's gonna get worse in the future thanks to CSS Animation Worklets, which are being developed as part of the CSS Houdini thing.

There comes a point when I have to decide: CSS or Javascript. I can't keep up with developments in both, and I enjoy coding Javascript more than CSS.

IMHO this article inadvertently shows why people hated CSS at the start. He spends a lot of time talking about color space conversions that few developers care about and Unicode filtering that even fewer people know about but glosses over basic layout by mentioning how floats allow for better inline images.

It’s like the designers didn’t even think about layout because that problem was already solved with HTML tables. But the problem was that when CSS came out there it came with the mantra of thou shalt not use tables for layout, but CSS was only specified enough to wrap text around an image, so designers had to torture inline-blocks and floats to try to achieve even basic layout tasks. This ended up bringing out a lot of edge case incompatibilities and fights with the layout engine. CSS had made the hard things possible while making the easy things hard.

It took decades before browsers finally supported CSS grids. A feature that should have been in the spec on day one.

As for those Unicode filters the syntax barely matters. Anybody who needs one is going to Google the magic string for their language and paste it into the document. Nobody wants to build one of those from first principles. That’s true of anything Unicode related—-it’s too complex with too many weird edge cases for mere mortals to handle.

Heck, I would have been happy to have had flexbox day one.

I think flexbox covers 'most' folks layout needs fairly easily, and you can learn it fairly easily and get a lot out of even basic flexbox knowledge.

Tables for layout were horrific. We talk about div spam these days but at least they're all just divs and divs follow divs rules. Unlike divs table, tr, td are all different and don't follow the same rules. And the result of table layouts was table inside tr,td in another table and in another table is its own nightmare and gets ultra inflexible and could require whole hog layout changes just to move a widget if the widget was just a bit too big. Tables were horrible.

Just flexbox day one would have been amazing.