>> But despite our best efforts, frustrating or confusing features exist, and in all likelihood will continue to be added.
The above statement makes me question both the sincerity and intensity of "best efforts."
Why is CSS the way it is?
81–90 of 173 posts
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#82CSS is amazing. It's hilarious to watch the twisted ways people will work around it, or spend time making libraries to find solutions to problems that don't exist; without ever even trying to get comfortable with it. Its an amazing and simple piece of technology. Kind of a shame. Id love a real history and critical discussion on the "tools" we have now for web dev.
I'd rather it be a programming language, which Netscape tried to do with Javascript Style Sheets in the late 90s. Was way more flexible, but was never accepted as a standard and of course, was not supported by IE.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#83I've found that since using utility/functional CSS in the form of Tailwind that I actually enjoy making UI's now. Coupled with componentization in the form of a JS framework like Vue, I don't need to stress over CSS anymore.
No more LESS or SASS, no more .header-container, .header-parent-inner crap.
https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...
I'm sure some puritan naysayer will disagree but whatever. I value design system focused and productive styling for frontend. It works very well.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 muc…
SVG is simpler than CSS because it doesn't tackle the inherently difficult problems of adapting typography and layout to a wide variety of devices and aspect ratios. It is simpler in the same way it is simpler to create a PDF than to create an adaptive layout.
SVG is just scalable vector graphics, like Postscript which is the basis of PDF.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
CSS clicked for me from the very start. It was always fun, I never had problems with it (aside from the browser bugs, of course). Maybe problem others have with it is not because of the nature of the CSS, but because of people ignoring that nature and refusing to learn it and trying to carry over their experience with other technologies to CSS.
You were never asked to implement a simple three column layout in CSS where the center column expands with the screen size? That’s often the first thing people were asked to do in the early days after being asked to replace the old table based layout. CSS grid/flexbox took way too long to arrive.
You could do that easily with display:table ...in browsers that supported it. The problem was browser support (specifically IE) not CSS per se.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#86I 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…
Same here. Most of the devs I know who don't like CSS actually never read the docs, or really understand the box model and padding vs margin, etc. They don't treat it like a real language, and so they hate it. I've even worked with someone even recount that once they read the manual, it got a lot easier!
Of course, I'm a dinosaur. I still don't know nearly as much about flex, CSS grids, etc. but i actually have very few cases where the CSS that worked 10 years ago doesn't work today. Flex just makes it much easier, at the cost of adding multiple ways to do the same thing. IMO there's a real cost there. I try to use it minimally, but newer devs like to start with flex first.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#87This is a somewhat superficial history that only briefly touches on origins, and doesn't discuss the fundamental idea behind CSS, from which everything else is, directly or otherwise, a consequence. Two decades ago I was overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last do…
Don't forget the gigabytes of code spent trying to work around the cascade and produce some kind of framework for styling "components" that doesn't leak crazy state from the enclosing context (but does inherit the good stuff). The "cascade" was, for sure, a mistake.
Not being in this world, though, I do wonder why there's been no real attempt to fix this from the ground up? I mean... it wouldn't really be "hard" to come up with an alternative metaphor for styling a tree of DOM fragments that compiled to CSS where needed but could be implemented as a first class technology with a proper specification.
Modern browsers have multiple competing implementations of all sorts of other technologies. Why has no one tried to do a new style language? What should it look like?
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I often use grids when flex would do just to take advantage of the grid gap features. Once the more general gap feature lands in most browsers I’ll probably start using flex more again.
I too am looking forward to that. 99% of the time `&>:not(:last-child) { margin-right: 4px; }` does the trick, but that 1% (usually wrapping) normally leads to compromises.
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> by the same company that controls the HTML and HTTP standards So your solution is to dig the hole even deeper?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
Totally off-topic:
He he, that's a funny link. We know the end-state of absolutely unfettered capitalism :-)
We've had it, that's why they invented the guillotine. It was called "feudalism".
Re: Why is CSS the way it is?
#90This is a somewhat superficial history that only briefly touches on origins, and doesn't discuss the fundamental idea behind CSS, from which everything else is, directly or otherwise, a consequence. Two decades ago I was overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last do…
Can we just start over on the entire web stack?
1. create a serious styling and scripting framework, basically React as a language since people seem to like it 2. implement an interpreter in WASM. Ship the interpreter with the website unless the browser says not to 3. over time, build the interpreter into the browser