Hell Yes CSS

I'm not a fan of CSS. I learned it well enough to build a decent UI toolkit (draggable modals, collapsible, etc.)

I hate how CSS tries to mix layout and style. A million articles about not using tables for layout, and it took 20+ years to get a grid. I tried to do some fancy text and element alignment with CSS, and it was not having it (and, yes, I know about display: table). In the end I reverted to a table. It worked, and I moved on with life.

It is ridiculously hard to draw things in absolute positions. In many cases, it is easier to do a tiny bit of math and compute the positions of objects, rather than have to define parent/child relationships. But for true absolute positioning, you have to throw divs into a "portal" of some sort, and move that object into the root element. This makes doing things like pretty drag and drop extremely painful.

Browsers are buggy as hell, and often something works on everything but [insert your most hated browser]. That's a hint that the spec is too complicated.

I agree with your assessment, in that if you try to construct the world from scratch, you'll be "fighting the beast the whole way." I disagree that this is positive quality of the thing.

Now, I think what helps me is that I've had 20 years to learn it as changes appeared.

If I had to learn it all in one go now, how confused would I be? Very? Lots?

It could be that a good way to learn CSS would be to try and replicate that experience and learn the history of it, not just the current state.

[1] Edit: CSS was designed for styled documents, such as online resumes or blogs. It was not designed to make interactive apps, which is why it doesn’t fit that paradigm well. Everyone thought Java applets would run the interactive web, and we would be making web applications in Java today if Microsoft had not killed Java on the web in the late 1990s with IE.

For the newbies, back in the CSS 1 days, the intention was to create separate styling rules to make maintaining or changing styles easier. If you ever had to style HTML before CSS by wrapping each and every any colour or font change in HTML elements or embedding background colour attributes inside each table cell, you'll understand the pain it was addressing. The CSS 1 spec was relatively small and easy to understand - although pretty limited.

I first seriously tried to make that work in the IE4 days. IE4 was almost kinda OK at CSS1, but NN4.x was just awful. Opera was (not surprisingly) the best at CSS, but nobody used it.

The complex layout stuff came not log after in the much bigger CSS 2, but the nature of IE only badly implementing a fraction of it for a decade or more meant that most people just cargo culted IE work arounds and never really sat down to learn any of the principles. Not claiming they were great principles, just that there were some :)

As it turns out, HTML wasn’t even originally a Word alternative. The original web, as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee used something called “semantic” markup. For example, a HTML page would have , and it was up to the browser and end user whether was bold, italic, or in another color.

It was only in the late 1990s, during the Netscape-IE wars, that CSS was tacked on to HTML; that’s why CSS syntax looks nothing like HTML syntax. CSS changed the web from a world where could look any of a number of different ways in to a world where would be, say, Lora Serif 600 weight italic at 24point.

Javascript dynamically altering webpages to make applications was never the plan. It only ended up that way because Java applets on the web were effectively killed by Microsoft when Internet Explorer won the IE-Netscape wars, and no other plugin was widely available to fill the gap Java left. Flash was too proprietary and closed-source to take over the web, but it was huge for a while until Javascript finally caught up in the post-IE web of the 2010s.