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Is there too much CSS now?

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Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#81

Post by imbnwa »

tines wrote: post #31
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.

That doesn't seem fair, CSS is a visual design DSL, whats the point of a DSL if it doesn't have batteries included?

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#82

Post by wnevets »

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.

> Ever since CSS grid became a thing,

I find myself having to relearn Grid every time I try to use. It actually reminds me a lot of RegEx. Super powerful and helpful but nothing about it sticks in memory.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#83

Post by bryanrasmussen »

grepLeigh wrote: post #42

No, it's amazing what you can accomplish with CSS now! You used to have to listen for user events with Javascript (later jQuery, around 2006) to add/remove CSS classes. There was no :hover :focus etc. Today, CSS pseudo-classes cover just about every transition state you need when designing a web application. I appreciate the approach frameworks like Tailwind are taking to CSS. At first I found it awkward to include s…

>There was no :hover :focus etc.

All those were in the spec in 2006 (ok not sure about focus pseudo selector but I think so, I mean first-line was supported focus must have been), unfortunately due to MS they were not completely implemented for every element they were specified so and thus the jQuery hacks you remember.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#84

Post by camtarn »

iquerno wrote: post #12
Julesman wrote: post #11

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 .

...what mirror-universe version of Python are you using?

One of my two main languages nowadays is Python, mostly deployed on single cloud instances, and it's still a case of writing a text file, sticking a #!/usr/bin/python at the top, and running it.

Obviously if you're doing something that pulls in a ton of dependencies and uses live ever-changing APIs, you're in a much more complicated situation, but Python has never stopped being really darn simple for the simple use cases.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#85

Post by quechimba »

petepete wrote: post #55
jancsika wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I found watching Kevin Powell's intro on YouTube really helpful. I already had a basic understanding of grid before watching it, but this helped me make sense of the snippets I'd pieced together in my brain over the last couple of years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg7Fvvl3taU

His channel is really good, I've learned a lot

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#86

Post by rglover »

The youngins' have no idea how good they have it. I'm an IE6 veteran and comparing now to then, today's CSS is a dream.

I think most people dislike it nowadays because it requires two skillsets: visual creativity and technical aptitude (most people can only fulfill one of those halves).

It can be easy to project shortcomings in visual creativity onto the language which I don't think is very fair but I tend to see often being at the root of people's dismissals of the language.

If you're just taking designs from someone else and implementing them, the CSS part of front-end is comparatively easy to what it was just a decade and change ago. It's still not perfect (and never will be with competing browser vendors/rendering engines), but the time investment to implement complex designs is substantially less than it was. That's a win.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#87

Post by autoexec »

DerekBickerton wrote: post #10

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 already want an add-on that allows me to disable certain CSS features just like I block JS by default. It's becoming a problem for sure.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#88

Post by tannhaeuser »

pornel wrote: post #8

On the upside, all the basic properties and selectors work now across browsers. You don't need to know about hasLayout, mysterious 3px margins or inline-table hacks. If you don't follow the latest hotness of the week, you can develop in one browser, then just quickly check in a couple of others, and 99% of the time it's fine.

May have more to do with only two CSS renderers left (counting blink and webkit as one).

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#89

Post by naasking »

alwillis wrote: post #66
naasking wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that argument JavaScript is also compiled, so this point is wrong no matter how you interpret it: if "interpreted" means source code is transmitted and then executed in whatever fashion, then both JS and CSS are interpreted, if "interpreted" means a specific execution model on the client machine, then they are both JIT compiled and neither are interpreted.

By that argument JavaScript is also compiled, so this point is wrong no matter how you interpret it… The primary difference between a traditionally compiled language (like C) and CSS and JavaScript is C is compiled before execution and CSS and JavaScript are compiled during execution. There’s a reason why JIT stands for Just In Time compilation [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation

Yes I know the difference, the point is that the original poster said CSS is faster because JS is interpreted. There is no way to intrepret that statement in a way that makes sense.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#90

Post by alwillis »

DerekBickerton wrote: post #10

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…

>CSS has become like a scripting language now. You can do things like nested CSS[0], keyframe animations…

The WebKit team first proposed keyframe animation in 2009 [1], so that’s been here for a while.

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/

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