My First CSS
engineering.kablamo.com.au
My First CSS
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Re: My First CSS
#2Front Ender sounds like a Minecraft boss
Re: My First CSS
#3>CSS can be hard to grasp when you're starting out
The browser differences especially for the box model were the bigger problem.
Re: My First CSS
#4CSS is a lot like the underground infrastructure of NYC. Most of it was happenstance, a lot of it is undocumented or no longer remembered, you ignore the advice of authorities at your own peril, and no matter what you're trying to do it's going to involve a lot of digging.
Re: My First CSS
#5These are good concrete concepts to use as a foundation.
I would add a general principle that I think is really important: let the layout engine do as much work for you as possible. Which is to say, tell it as little as possible.
If you want that to be narrower, you probably don't want to set it to a narrower `width`, you want to step back and understand where its current width is coming from, and determine how that flow can be shifted upstream to achieve the desired result. CSS is a language of constraints; use them to guide the layout like water, instead of hammering it into place like wooden planks.
When you do the latter, that's how you end up in a quagmire of competing constraints where the sum behavior is impossible to predict, and changing that behavior is infuriating (and often involves `important!`s). That's the kind of situation most people are talking about when they say they hate CSS. For some, it's all they've ever known.
Re: My First CSS
#6Based on the way the article is written, I assume that software engineering was not new to the author when he first started writing CSS. It seems strange to me to write an article like this because it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first.
I'm honestly just trying to understand how articles like this get promoted to the front page of Hacker News more and more often. I imagine that writing an article about [insert related field of mathematics] before diving into [insert field of physics] every week would not land me on the front page of Hacker News every week.
Edit: "basic field" -> "related field".
Re: My First CSS
#7Based on the way the article is written, I assume that software engineering was not new to the author when he first started writing CSS. It seems strange to me to write an article like this because it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first. I'm honestly just trying to understand how articles like this get promoted to the front page of Hacker News more and mo…
> it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first
You'd be surprised how many otherwise-competent engineers don't take CSS seriously enough to seek out the fundamentals, and instead spend their days avoiding it as much as possible and cursing it when they can't
Re: My First CSS
#8Based on the way the article is written, I assume that software engineering was not new to the author when he first started writing CSS. It seems strange to me to write an article like this because it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first. I'm honestly just trying to understand how articles like this get promoted to the front page of Hacker News more and mo…
The question then comes, where would one go to learn the fundamentals-and what are they now?
Being someone who was ahead of the game in css 15 years ago, but not having touched it since - where would one go to understand the new fundamentals and options available?
Re: My First CSS
#9These are good concrete concepts to use as a foundation. I would add a general principle that I think is really important: let the layout engine do as much work for you as possible. Which is to say, tell it as little as possible. If you want that to be narrower, you probably don't want to set it to a narrower `width`, you want to step back and understand where its current width is coming from, and determine how that…
A div? Narrower? Why? Oh because the text is cut off and scrolls sideways instead of running down the page, even though you can't see a horizontal scrollbar?
Ah, well _that_ width is dictated by some image code at the bottom of the page text. The image was cropped incorrectly because the designer was on vacation and they had to use some random online crop tool during our cloud software outage. We fixed it with some additional markup and inline CSS, but the inline CSS was stripped during an upgrade to the latest inline HTML editor we use here.
Anyway, the graphic was supposed to be a flourished section break that was center-aligned, and instead it is now a white bar that is currently even longer than the anchor text that is also overlapping the background imagery.
If you remove the graphic, be careful because it reveals this...other problem, also with the CSS.
You know you can scroll to the left and right really easily if you hold down shift?
Re: My First CSS
#10I've known those things listed for 15 years now, and they did not help with the wack-a-mole problem. Especially not when working with multiple people.
The only thing I've found to actually work is to keep things as simple as possible when it comes to your actual stylesheet. Any kind of complexity including some core CSS properties (e.g. the C for cascading) I avoid. My second box .foo is only slightly different so I will adapt it based on its parent .bar leads to misery. Eventually you will need .baz .bar .foo. Or .bar .foo:not(.shoot-me) and all of that will be burried in 100+K of code done by people that left the project 2 years ago. Hence wack-a-mole. So I try to do myself a favor and just avoid any kind of CSS logic. The complexity will be moved to the template, so not really gone, but at least you can make a change and not worry about something else breaking. And at the very least, if it gets complicated, you can write a test to check if your html code contains proper classes.