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Learn CSS

web.dev

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Re: Learn CSS

#52

Post by watwut »

goto11 wrote: post #33

Looks great! Small pet peeve regarding tutorials: When learning a new technology I don't care about the headaches people had 20 years ago. My first concern is how I use the technology and what it can do for me. The section about layout starts with: " In the early days of the web, designs more complex than a simple document were laid out with elements. Separating HTML from visual styles was made easier when CSS was wi…

Specifically with CSS, if you omit this, the first logical question of anybody who attempts to learn it is "wtf, why does it work in such a stupid way".

Basically, historical context helps to cool down natural negative reaction.

Re: Learn CSS

#53

Post by frosted-flakes »

dhimes wrote: post #41

This looks good. I've been using mdn mostly; but I usually go deep into CSS for a bit then leave it for long periods of time. That said, what has replaced SASS? I'm struggling to find a preprocessor that allows nesting/grouping etc. Or is that built into CSS by now? Being able to nest CSS was a game changer for me in terms of css organization.

Nesting is still not possible in regular CSS. In fact, it's the only reason I still use Sass—I don't use any of Sass's other advanced features.

Re: Learn CSS

#54

Post by onion2k »

goto11 wrote: post #33

Looks great! Small pet peeve regarding tutorials: When learning a new technology I don't care about the headaches people had 20 years ago. My first concern is how I use the technology and what it can do for me. The section about layout starts with: " In the early days of the web, designs more complex than a simple document were laid out with elements. Separating HTML from visual styles was made easier when CSS was wi…

This history lesson is not really relevant for newbies.

If you're working on a new project that's true. If you're working on an old project, and bringing it up to date, then understanding the code that's there is very useful. That starts with understanding how things were in the past, and why people did things that might seem a bit crazy (eg spacer.gif).

Re: Learn CSS

#55

Post by iamunr »

kaycebasques wrote: post #29

I'm the content lead for web.dev. Just wanted to give a quick shout out to the people who made this happen because it's not clear on the site. I think this is also useful information because you'll see that a lot of CSS experts we're involved in this project. Adam Argyle [1] and Una Kravets [2] created the podcast series. Una mainly drove the overall project to convert the podcasts into this written series. Adam prov…

Thanks for sharing this!

Re: Learn CSS

#56

Post by joshspankit »

goto11 wrote: post #33

Looks great! Small pet peeve regarding tutorials: When learning a new technology I don't care about the headaches people had 20 years ago. My first concern is how I use the technology and what it can do for me. The section about layout starts with: " In the early days of the web, designs more complex than a simple document were laid out with elements. Separating HTML from visual styles was made easier when CSS was wi…

I see the reason for people’s disagreement, but with a very important exception:

Sometimes new ways of doing things completely free us from the friction of the previous ways, and people who do not already have those scars have the advantage of being unrestricted by them

Re: Learn CSS

#57

Post by blacktriangle »

astatine wrote: post #9

I struggle with CSS. I am not sure it's CSS that's proving difficult or the ability to design anything even remotely presentable. I suspect my struggles are more to do with the latter. Looking at good designs and trying to derive a variant that works for me turn into incredibly frustrating exercises. Let me see if this content helps.

I'd second doing this tutorial. I think what they have is terrible for somebody brand new to CSS, but for a developer who has worked with CSS and still not quite put it all together, this tutorial is great.

For me one of the keys to "getting" CSS, and I think is the hardest, worst part of CSS, is understanding all of the implicit contexts that are generated. For example, elements have positioning roots. Nowhere does this word even show up in the CSS language, you have to know that it's created whenever an element has a position that is not static.

Similarly elements have a stacking context which is hugely important to understanding z-index and transform. Again never explicitly mentioned, inststead stacking contexts are implicitly created by a variety of actions like setting an element's background color to anything with a non-zero opacity.

Re: Learn CSS

#59

Post by nkozyra »

goto11 wrote: post #33

Looks great! Small pet peeve regarding tutorials: When learning a new technology I don't care about the headaches people had 20 years ago. My first concern is how I use the technology and what it can do for me. The section about layout starts with: " In the early days of the web, designs more complex than a simple document were laid out with elements. Separating HTML from visual styles was made easier when CSS was wi…

I don't want to pile on here, but give another reason why you might care how people did things 5, 10, 20 years ago: you're likely to encounter that code at some point.
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