Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things I wish I’d known about CSS

cssfordesigners.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 340 posts

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#291

Post by hutzlibu »

cosmodisk wrote: post #169
theelous3 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cobbler here, currently cobbling a frontend (am a backend dev by trade). The issue for me is the format these courses and resources take. CSS is the most jam packed with non-intuitive technology I've met. How many dozens of pages or segments of video would I have to go through in a course to learn what the author in OP summarised in two or three sentences? Any time I've considered the structured approach for somethin…

Couldn't agree more. I had less issues learning multiple programming languages,some challenging concepts around them and yet when it comes to CSS, most resources aren't very useful. You do something and it doesn't work. You check documentation and it show exactly the same thing that does work. 5 hours later it turns out it was some overriding property+ browser incompatibility+ weird undocumented exception. Very few b…

" but the whole ecosystem is a bit weird."

It absolutely is.

The web was meant for static documents and some link magic.

Now allmost every complex programm can run in the browser with web technologies. And in the time between you had lots of powerful organisations with their own agenda, as well as millions of single developers with a agenda and a loud voice. How could a sane, clear spec be made, under these circumstances?

Besides, it would be very hard, to make a clean spec that satisfies the needs of the whole population. So by now I say, all in all, it works pretty good.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#292

Post by _jal »

mslm wrote: post #173
theelous3 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cobbler here, currently cobbling a frontend (am a backend dev by trade). The issue for me is the format these courses and resources take. CSS is the most jam packed with non-intuitive technology I've met. How many dozens of pages or segments of video would I have to go through in a course to learn what the author in OP summarised in two or three sentences? Any time I've considered the structured approach for somethin…

I had the same perspective on these frontend technologies as a backend/ops guy, and it all finally clicked when it came to me that I just couldn't find a justification for why CSS was the way it was. This was solved trivially by just reading the history of CSS. It was shocking to finally have made clear all of the quirks and weird aspects of CSS that always made it difficult for me to connect the dots and feel myself…

This is a great comment. I expect it only applies to some folks depending on how they learn, but it resonates a lot with me.

I find it very difficult to learn the whats and hows of a new thing without the whys. I tend to construct mental frameworks of things, revising the inaccurate bits as I go, until theory starts meeting practice. (I always did poorly with math "teachers" whose method was, "doesn't matter, just do it." But it did take a while to realize that they were failing, not me.)

So when I encounter complicated, new things with a history, I usually try to start with at least a bit of the history.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#293

Post by miiiiiike »

commandlinefan wrote: post #287
miiiiiike wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been happy with a front-end dev that I've paid six-figures to. I once paid a senior front-end engineer far too much to do a fairly involved layout. Three months, an uncountable number of bugs, and one unusable tangle of Sass later I pulled the plug and swore off ever hiring a "CSS Person" again. I took the Linus+Git approach and said "I'm not writing another line of Python until I understand CSS." After a…

> I've never met a CSS Person who has read a book on CSS I'm not a CSS person, but I've read three (including CSSTDG) and I still can't do anything useful with CSS.

Ha!

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#294

Post by andrewmcwatters »

irrational wrote: post #284
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a layout implementor for Planimeter's Grid Engine. Implementing a naive subset of the algorithm for calculating the box sizes in the visual formatting model and calculating layout for normal flow, relative positioning, and absolute positioning is far easier to implement than flexbox.[1] There's nothing insane about this. And you'll learn even more when trying to draw to the screen. Normal flow also doesn't requir…

What are your thoughts on CSS Grid? Does it require multiple passes?

I have not made any website or UI designs which require it, so I'm not experienced enough with it to say. As a result, I also have not made attempts to implement it.

c-smile is a well known implementor in the space, and his comments are valuable as well.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#295

Post by Priem19 »

jb1991 wrote: post #31

Yikes. I've been earning 6 figures as of about two years ago doing mostly HTML and CSS UI design for a bank. And I still did not know about many of these! I guess they are things I wish I'd known about CSS! Better late than never I guess.

Six figures for HTML and CSS, sorry, but I don't believe you.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#296

Post by dahfizz »

balfirevic wrote: post #271
LandR wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My down payment was £70k, interest rate is 2.14% When I renew at end of year it shoul be around 1.1%

Well damn, I don't think there is anything below 3.00% (3.50% more common) where I live. That's nominal - 3.5% - 4.0% is the effective interest rate. I don't know much about mortgages, so not sure if I'm missing something. Congrats on your place - it looks great!

Is that right? I think inflation makes the effective interest rate lower than the nominal rate.

You could imagine that inflation pays ~1% of your mortgage for you because each dollar that you owe is becoming less and less valuable.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#297

Post by Silhouette »

hutzlibu wrote: post #291
cosmodisk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. I had less issues learning multiple programming languages,some challenging concepts around them and yet when it comes to CSS, most resources aren't very useful. You do something and it doesn't work. You check documentation and it show exactly the same thing that does work. 5 hours later it turns out it was some overriding property+ browser incompatibility+ weird undocumented exception. Very few b…

" but the whole ecosystem is a bit weird." It absolutely is. The web was meant for static documents and some link magic. Now allmost every complex programm can run in the browser with web technologies. And in the time between you had lots of powerful organisations with their own agenda, as well as millions of single developers with a agenda and a loud voice. How could a sane, clear spec be made, under these circumsta…

How could a sane, clear spec be made, under these circumstances?

Serious answer: By respecting and supporting the organisation that had for a long time codified realistic web standards reasonably well. When the Web was younger, you could (and many of us did) learn all you needed to know about things like HTML and CSS by reading the documentation produced by the W3C. In many cases, the official recommendations themselves (the documents that were informally called "web standards") were very readable and short enough for normal developers to go through the whole thing.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#298

Post by Silhouette »

runarberg wrote: post #234
theelous3 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cobbler here, currently cobbling a frontend (am a backend dev by trade). The issue for me is the format these courses and resources take. CSS is the most jam packed with non-intuitive technology I've met. How many dozens of pages or segments of video would I have to go through in a course to learn what the author in OP summarised in two or three sentences? Any time I've considered the structured approach for somethin…

Your evaluation is problematic. I am a front-end dev by trade and I could really easily say similar things about the tech stack you work with daily. If you want a good reference and a learning guide start with this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS it is what us professional use. For us professionals that use CSS in our jobs, that have put the same amount of hours into front end technology as you have…

Or spend a few thousand hours learning and mastering the craft.

Surely the point is that you shouldn't need to spend thousands of hours "mastering" something like CSS? It's not that complicated and it's not that important. If you told a developer working on desktop or mobile applications that they'd need to spend years "mastering" the design tools in whatever GUI framework they were using before they'd be able to independently build a good user interface, you'd be ridiculed.

Anyone with the aptitude and interest to become a web developer, which isn't a particularly high bar as technologies go, should be able to get the hang of all the important parts of modern CSS in at most a week even starting from scratch. The fact that we don't reliably train new developers up that efficiently is a damning indictment of the current state of the industry.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#299

Post by balfirevic »

dahfizz wrote: post #296
balfirevic wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well damn, I don't think there is anything below 3.00% (3.50% more common) where I live. That's nominal - 3.5% - 4.0% is the effective interest rate. I don't know much about mortgages, so not sure if I'm missing something. Congrats on your place - it looks great!

Is that right? I think inflation makes the effective interest rate lower than the nominal rate. You could imagine that inflation pays ~1% of your mortgage for you because each dollar that you owe is becoming less and less valuable.

Effective interest rate is, to my understanding, not related to inflation. It's just a way to make loans with various compounding periods easily comparable (I'm mostly citing this from Wikipedia, I'm far from expert here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_interest_rate )

I just mentioned it for the sake of providing more information to whomever was reading my comment.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#300

Post by jraph »

runarberg wrote: post #288
jraph wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah but then it does not work as a mnemonic anymore! I'm kidding. Thanks, TIL I learned that with now have display-inside and display-outside (and flow[-root]). This makes perfect sense. Finally, even, I'd say. Having a property that defines both the behaviors of an element outside and inside without being able to define these behaviors separately was both strange and limiting. I'm happy I even used the terms that hav…

I recommend taking the State of CSS[1] survey, it is a nice way of keeping up with the latest features. Other then that I use PostCSS with the postcss-preset-env[2] plugin. There you can enable various future features of the language and have it compile down to a more supported version. If your really want to dive into the future of CSS you can read the issue board for the CSSWG[3] (beware, it can suck hours out of y…

Thank you very much :-)
Post reply on HN