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Is there too much CSS now?

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Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#31

Post by tines »

jhp123 wrote: post #28

there's a very old argument in computer science between minimal standards and "batteries included" standards — RISC vs CISC, C vs C++, scheme vs common lisp, Algol W vs Algol 68 etc. 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…

Big languages are optimized for copy-and-paste; the more built-in features your language has, the fewer characters you need to steal from a StackOverflow answer. This meshes well with the copy-and-paste culture of web development, so it's likely that web technologies will always be complex this way.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#32

Post by jancsika »

bob1029 wrote: post #21

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.

What's the best reference and tutorial for modern CSS grid compatible across the standard browsers?

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#33

Post by bob1029 »

jancsika wrote: post #32
bob1029 wrote: post #21

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.

What's the best reference and tutorial for modern CSS grid compatible across the standard browsers?

Maybe start with MDN?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/grid

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#34

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

sbf501 wrote: post #26
politelemon wrote: post #20

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…

> Too much CSS, possibly. > Too much cognitive load, definitely, I do think so. 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 s…

> 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?

The W3Schools page for says it is not supported in HTML 5 [0]. The MDN page for it warns that it may be removed from browsers at any time, though the compatibility table says it's still supported in every browser.

[0] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_frame.asp

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/fr...

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#35

Post by blueslurpee »

jancsika wrote: post #32
bob1029 wrote: post #21

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.

What's the best reference and tutorial for modern CSS grid compatible across the standard browsers?

In addition to the sibling you might like: https://cssgridgarden.com/

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#36

Post by tiborsaas »

> And that’s where I, myself, land in the end. I’ve made my peace with the fact that I will probably never use — or even know about — all possible CSS features.

Do painters also complain that they are not using all possible colors, shapes and techniques?

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#37

Post by thfuran »

sbf501 wrote: post #26
politelemon wrote: post #20

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…

> Too much CSS, possibly. > Too much cognitive load, definitely, I do think so. 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 s…

>Do you think this is inevitable? I tend to think languages need major overhauls and backwards-compatibility breaking in order to become "cleaner".

I think it's pretty much inevitable when use case and/or feature set significantly changes but there's not a comprehensive overhaul of existing work. I think programming languages, code bases, and even cities all have basically the same issue: if the goal or the environment has significantly changed after a lot of work has been done, you're likely to end up with a final product that isn't what you'd choose if you were starting today.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#38

Post by tikhonj »

politelemon wrote: post #20

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…

I've just started playing around with CSS after a seven year break from web programming and have the opposite impression. The two biggest additions I've seen are flexbox and grid both of which massively decrease the cognitive load—compared to past options, it almost feels like cheating. Moreover, they do this by consciously not building on top of past layout features but instead doing their own thing.

CSS is still a mess of random features that can't be cleanly composed or extended—it's the complete opposite of a language that can grow[1]—but it's a more usable mess than it used to be.

[1]: Wonderful talk on language design by Guy Steele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#39

Post by racl101 »

Being a backend web developer, for the longest time I felt I could get by using CSS frameworks but now it's so bloody complicated even with the framework.

While I'm glad that CSS is more expressive and hacks are becoming a thing of the past I feel that it is a discipline that I can no longer half ass.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#40

Post by seydor »

I wonder where it goes from here. Maybe at some point the whole thing will implode, and chrome will come up with a simpler skinning toolkit and people will start using that one and css gets forgotten
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