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My favourite 3 lines of CSS

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Re: My favourite 3 lines of CSS

#21

Post by jraph »

irrational wrote: post #13
zoul wrote: post #9

I am increasingly worried about the “smart” CSS solutions. The spec is already huge, the selectors are hard to read and google, the interplay between various features is devilishly complex. And the CSS community seems to be very fond of these smart hacks where people in the know say “Oh, that’s just Foo’s variation on Bar’s flex owl hammer” and you are left to study the CSS lore for hours to decrypt the two or three…

I had the exact same sentiment when the arrow function was added to JS. My mind has not been changed in the years since. Clear is always better than clever, arrow functions are not clear (despite the desperate cries to the contrary by complexity loving programmers).

Of all the JS features you are picking the arrow function? Is it the syntax, or the this binding thing that works differently than function expressions / statements you are complaining about?

Because the syntax looks somewhat like the function notation in math, and a variation of it is also present in many programming languages, often functional, but also Java since version 8. It's quite widespread and not very bizarre / specific to JS.

You'd have mentioned tagged templates [1], I'd have to bow.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Re: My favourite 3 lines of CSS

#22

Post by mickeyp »

zoul wrote: post #9

I am increasingly worried about the “smart” CSS solutions. The spec is already huge, the selectors are hard to read and google, the interplay between various features is devilishly complex. And the CSS community seems to be very fond of these smart hacks where people in the know say “Oh, that’s just Foo’s variation on Bar’s flex owl hammer” and you are left to study the CSS lore for hours to decrypt the two or three…

The bit about googling is correct. But I posed it to ChaTGPT and it explained it immediately.

Having said that, I also knew what it did immediately upon reading it, and I am not a CSS expert. One you know a little bit about selectors, then you should be able to decode this one rather easily.

Re: My favourite 3 lines of CSS

#23

Post by lenkite »

zoul wrote: post #9

I am increasingly worried about the “smart” CSS solutions. The spec is already huge, the selectors are hard to read and google, the interplay between various features is devilishly complex. And the CSS community seems to be very fond of these smart hacks where people in the know say “Oh, that’s just Foo’s variation on Bar’s flex owl hammer” and you are left to study the CSS lore for hours to decrypt the two or three…

Better a single smart and simple CSS one-liner like this accompanied by an article link in the comment than a gazillion repeated CSS classes and exclusion rules.

Re: My favourite 3 lines of CSS

#25

Post by Klonoar »

zoul wrote: post #9

I am increasingly worried about the “smart” CSS solutions. The spec is already huge, the selectors are hard to read and google, the interplay between various features is devilishly complex. And the CSS community seems to be very fond of these smart hacks where people in the know say “Oh, that’s just Foo’s variation on Bar’s flex owl hammer” and you are left to study the CSS lore for hours to decrypt the two or three…

Maybe I'm just old as shit but this is nothing compared to some of the selector hacks we had to do back in the IE6/IE7 support era.

This isn't to say those hacks were good, mind you - just that their existence was never really a problem insofar as ability to understand them if you dealt with it once.

Re: My favourite 3 lines of CSS

#26

Post by microflash »

Very nice. I like the elegance of owl selectors, particularly when describing the spacing relationships between adjacent siblings.

It helps avoid bleeding issues of space which used to require :last-child / :first-child / :only-child overrides.

Re: My favourite 3 lines of CSS

#28

Post by aaronbrethorst »

mickeyp wrote: post #22
zoul wrote: post #9

I am increasingly worried about the “smart” CSS solutions. The spec is already huge, the selectors are hard to read and google, the interplay between various features is devilishly complex. And the CSS community seems to be very fond of these smart hacks where people in the know say “Oh, that’s just Foo’s variation on Bar’s flex owl hammer” and you are left to study the CSS lore for hours to decrypt the two or three…

The bit about googling is correct. But I posed it to ChaTGPT and it explained it immediately. Having said that, I also knew what it did immediately upon reading it, and I am not a CSS expert. One you know a little bit about selectors, then you should be able to decode this one rather easily.

Maybe save us all the trouble and either copy-and-paste the robot's explanation, or share your own.

Re: My favourite 3 lines of CSS

#30

Post by atoav »

As someone who decidedly likes CSS I think something like this is "too clever". There are some things that should be as boring as possible. Layouts themselves are already a complex matter, so even the most boring and readable css will not be totally boring.

When I was younger I also had a phase where I liked to do things like these because I could. Nowadays I do things in a way that doesn't waste my own (or other people's) time by being too clever

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