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Is there too much CSS now?

css-tricks.com

11–20 of 125 posts

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#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.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#12

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 .

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#14

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 don't think of nesting or calc as scripting like.

Animation control is where things start to get weird.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#15

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.

What is an edgelord?: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-is-an-edg...

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#17
post #12

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 .

the difference seems to be

* the burden of CSS implementation of standards, is mostly on browsers

* the new standards are supposed to be reducing complexity. Nobody wants to go back to hacking rounded corners together. CSS Grid finally gave us a sane way to specify 2D layouts, which were previously all designed by hacking 1D-priority things.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#18

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.

The article doesn't think that. Did you get to the end of the article? They agree with a tweet arguing the features are worth it.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#19

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 when their dependent values update, instantaneously as part of the update to the dependent values. Like an Excel grid-cell.

To me, however constrained "programming" in CSS still is, this makes for far better "programming ergonomics" than JS could ever give me — which, as you say, has me always reaching for a CSS solution before one in JS.

Re: Is there too much CSS now?

#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 unintuitive nature. Of course, once you start using it, it becomes just another tool.

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