21–30 of 125 posts
Ever since CSS grid became a thing, I dumpstered all of the 3rd party web framework stuff I had been using. Placing elements in the right parts of the viewport (across all target devices) has always been 95% of the reason I consumed 3rd party libraries.
CSS has become like a scripting language now. You can do things like nested CSS[0], keyframe animations[1], calc operations[2], etc It has become very JavaScript-like and this is why I always try to see if I can do something in CSS first before I resort to JS. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/css-nesting-1/ [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@keyframes [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/c…
I wouldn't compare it to a scripting language specifically; it's maybe powerful like JS, but I wouldn't say it's "very JavaScript-like" in any other way. I'd compare modern CSS more to a logic language like Prolog or SQL; or maybe to whatever you'd call Excel (dataflow programming?) In places where CSS takes expressions, they're always declarative, functional expressions; and they're always guaranteed to auto-update…
This take is a disaster. So we get a decade of bloated frameworks to compensate for missing properties and then just when browsers are about to catch up and make all that cruft pointless we get people complaining about it. This isn't a thing. This is some software engineer edgelording. Yeah, we get it, you don't like CSS because you aren't good at it. Just stop.
This reminds me of how the whole philosophy of python is 'simplicity', but the moment you want to start building something you must be reminded of how you haven't updated to the latest version of gnu-anaconda-conda-py-pip3-x86_64-cpython-limited-edition and are consequently prompted to download 5 Gigabytes of inference APIs to print hello world on a distributed multi-cloud pay-for-what-you-use Kubernetes instance .
No. It's finally getting to be reasonable. The hackarounds are being displaced in droves now. Ever since CSS grid became a thing, I dumpstered all of the 3rd party web framework stuff I had been using. Placing elements in the right parts of the viewport (across all target devices) has always been 95% of the reason I consumed 3rd party libraries.
The information environment is absolutely saturated with pollution from outdated answers to outdated questions. So while CSS might be getting to be reasonable, good luck to the random newbie trying to get things to work.
Too much CSS, possibly. Too much cognitive load, definitely, I do think so. As a whole, modern CSS features feel unintuitive and often require a historical knowledge of the problems this new feature X was trying to solve, which means to me, it's laden with baggage. Some new CSS feature pages on MDN are absolutely gigantic in their explanations, and that means that there is a lot of 'talking' required to overcome its…
That's a good way to put it. AFter reading those two statements, it started to occur to me that a well-organized concept can have breadth, but not tax one's cognitive facilities. I think of programming languages. They ALL started simple, but then accrete. Look at K&R's original C, then look at C2x. The cognitive load increases. Like you said, "require a historical knowledge"[1].
Do you think this is inevitable? I tend to think languages need major overhauls and backwards-compatibility breaking in order to become "cleaner". Intel & the PC maintained massive backwards compatibility, but parts of the architecture are a nightmare (like the intel instruction decoder); whereas early Apple tossed backwards compatibility routinely for better tech (now they do it for profit, I'm afraid). Same with Windows v. (early) MacOS.
When was the last time there was a major shift away from backwards compatibility in HTML/CSS? I don't think there has been... has there?
[1] (there was a post the other day on HN where a programmer was talking about a text editor and how he used nonprintable unicode to indicate new pages: this young cub had apparently never heard of the first 31 characters of ASCII!!)
The web community, for whatever reason, is firmly in the "batteries included" camp. CSS alone is approaching the number of built-in symbols as a "big" language like common lisp or Perl. New features are always loudly celebrated, even if they overlap with existing features, are very complicated, and/or serve very niche use cases.
Personally I think we need a "scheme" for the web — a little language that handles all the important pieces (layout, interaction, accessibility) with as little surface area as possible. It would be easier to learn, easier to understand others' code, easier to implement.
I have similar feelings about javascript. But, I figure I can ignore all new features and worry about learning them when the need for them arises.
This article seems to think the CSS spec is too big, which I don’t think is the case. We should be able to access lots of rendering options via CSS. But CSS stylesheets are definitely way too big.
Is disagree. I have no idea how to do CSS after five years of web programming, except using trial and error. Reading "what is new in CSS3" did not help much, but at least flexbox means I don't use howtocenterincss.com any more; while grids became my go-to for all problems, with four attributes that do something about margins and centering but I ignore them out of a lack of memorization.