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

You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

rexriepe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 70 posts

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#61

Post by _benton »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #50
_benton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason I think Tailwind became so popular is that it makes it much easier to pattern match CSS. I don't think it's a good or bad thing, it's just a thing.

Yeah, I am not saying its bad in all applications, just that people who use CSS these days rarely really know CSS (who can know it all?), which isn't really any different from the past on a general level. Yet, I think we should push our peers to view the entirety of CSS as meaningful and worthy of attention.

I'm forcing myself to use raw CSS in my recent work just so I can gain a better understanding of it. It's nice what you can achieve without JS, but man sometimes it just feels like arranging arcane symbols until you achieve the desired result.

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#62

Post by kyleyeats »

bigbuppo wrote: post #56
kyleyeats wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument I make in the book is that the last 5% of CSS/design should be written by people who can write CSS. Nobody else should even be writing CSS because it turns into a huge mess when everyone jumps in. I mothballed this project because people were so incredibly cruel about it (a CSS project!). Remember that people who work on this stuff are people, and we're just trying to make things better. Also, you can pr…

How do you expect anyone to learn CSS if they're being told to not even think about writing CSS unless they already know CSS? The whole premise demotivates learning. Experts weren't always experts. They had to start somewhere. If the world were to follow your advice, CSS would soon become dead knowledge. I am absolutely perplexed that you could write something, an act of conveying knowledge, and that you wanted to co…

Yep, it's weird and controversial. That's why I wrote a book explaining it and used a pseudonym.

Now: ~60% of devs know some CSS, rest feel guilty

YSAC's pitch: ~10% of devs know lots of CSS, rest avoid it without guilt (they suck and that's okay)

I guess 0% would mean a dead CSS, so it's closer to dead, sure.

If you get a more powerful saw, you can either cut down more trees or you can spend less time cutting down trees. CSS is a more powerful saw now. I'm suggesting spending less time cutting down trees instead of cutting down more trees.

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#63

Post by bigbuppo »

kyleyeats wrote: post #62
bigbuppo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you expect anyone to learn CSS if they're being told to not even think about writing CSS unless they already know CSS? The whole premise demotivates learning. Experts weren't always experts. They had to start somewhere. If the world were to follow your advice, CSS would soon become dead knowledge. I am absolutely perplexed that you could write something, an act of conveying knowledge, and that you wanted to co…

Yep, it's weird and controversial. That's why I wrote a book explaining it and used a pseudonym. Now: ~60% of devs know some CSS, rest feel guilty YSAC's pitch: ~10% of devs know lots of CSS, rest avoid it without guilt (they suck and that's okay) I guess 0% would mean a dead CSS, so it's closer to dead, sure. If you get a more powerful saw, you can either cut down more trees or you can spend less time cutting down t…

Learning how to properly use a chainsaw is of use to more than just those in the logging and treecare industries. Nobody is going to call me to remove that tree that's endangering a historic building or to cutdown a few hundred acres of raw toilet paper, but I still need to understand how and when to sharpen the chain if I'm going to be cutting down trees on my own land for use as firewood.

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#64

Post by bigbuppo »

kyleyeats wrote: post #62
bigbuppo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you expect anyone to learn CSS if they're being told to not even think about writing CSS unless they already know CSS? The whole premise demotivates learning. Experts weren't always experts. They had to start somewhere. If the world were to follow your advice, CSS would soon become dead knowledge. I am absolutely perplexed that you could write something, an act of conveying knowledge, and that you wanted to co…

Yep, it's weird and controversial. That's why I wrote a book explaining it and used a pseudonym. Now: ~60% of devs know some CSS, rest feel guilty YSAC's pitch: ~10% of devs know lots of CSS, rest avoid it without guilt (they suck and that's okay) I guess 0% would mean a dead CSS, so it's closer to dead, sure. If you get a more powerful saw, you can either cut down more trees or you can spend less time cutting down t…

I think you would have had significantly less blowback if you approached the subject from a positive angle. I know you were probably attempting to be humorous, but it just comes off as something wrong.

That sort of humor is best left for the experts...

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#65

Post by kyleyeats »

bigbuppo wrote: post #64
kyleyeats wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's weird and controversial. That's why I wrote a book explaining it and used a pseudonym. Now: ~60% of devs know some CSS, rest feel guilty YSAC's pitch: ~10% of devs know lots of CSS, rest avoid it without guilt (they suck and that's okay) I guess 0% would mean a dead CSS, so it's closer to dead, sure. If you get a more powerful saw, you can either cut down more trees or you can spend less time cutting down t…

I think you would have had significantly less blowback if you approached the subject from a positive angle. I know you were probably attempting to be humorous, but it just comes off as something wrong . That sort of humor is best left for the experts...

It's easy to mock people who've had a failed project. I wish you success with yours.

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#66

Post by kyleyeats »

bigbuppo wrote: post #36
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #9

Tell that to a decent number of people I have worked with over the past 20 years. In fact, I know people to this day who have been writing CSS for decades who don't really know fundamental things like specificity, inheritance, or the cascade. Pattern matching into the sunset, not a single fundamental piece of CSS specifications ever internalized, still getting paid (its okay). https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/specs.en.ht…

I tried to use a framework on a web project recently, but looking at the two most popular frameworks... one of the results in every site looking the same, while the other is a step backwards to the bad old days in the worst possible ways. It was simpler to start from scratch, and I finally understood the cascade. I was actually able to drop most of the explicit class attributes, which led to a significant reduction i…

Atomic CSS is great. It does abuse class="" in the same way style="" was abused. It's counter-intuitive but the obvious code smells produced here are better than the non-obvious code smells created by other style architecture approaches.

I've always now-and-then packaged up and open-sourced the pattern I use for CSS. The projects have gotten smaller and smaller. This reflects well on CSS as a technology.

I think class="" has more to offer in an information density sense. There's more potential there than style="" had. Instantly lumping them together was my first response too, but I was wrong. The in-the-HTML shorthand of frameworks like Bootstrap/Tailwind/CASS is insanely useful in a way that inline styles never were.

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#67

Post by bigbuppo »

kyleyeats wrote: post #65
bigbuppo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you would have had significantly less blowback if you approached the subject from a positive angle. I know you were probably attempting to be humorous, but it just comes off as something wrong . That sort of humor is best left for the experts...

It's easy to mock people who've had a failed project. I wish you success with yours.

If we didn't fail, we wouldn't learn.

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#68

Post by DicIfTEx »

hinkley wrote: post #13
tombert wrote: post #8

I never got very good with CSS or HTML styling. I know enough to generally fix obvious stuff, but I'm kind of a luddite and still use Bootstrap for most of my stuff. I've mostly stopped doing web stuff, so the only time I touch CSS is when I'm doing an admin screen or something, so it doesn't have to look great. Still, a part of me wonders how different my life would be if I had taken to frontend programming enough t…

I did for a while when CSS3 was new. Big problem with evergreen standards: if you try to come back to a standard that is now twice as big but still has the same version number, there is nobody writing books to teach you what you missed out on. Want to come from CSS2 to 3? They got you. Want to do backend development for five years and then get a summary on what you missed? Go fuck yourself.

FWIW you're not alone in thinking that: there's a W3C CSS4 Community Group[0] now, and you can find more detail on their proposal at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4770 and ongoing CSS[3|4|5|Next] categorisation work at https://css-levels.netlify.app/

[0]: https://www.w3.org/community/css4/

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#69

Post by dang »

robocat wrote: post #37
sunami-ai wrote: post #21

My view is that those who designed CSS suck when it comes to designing intuitive systems. I would not advocate constraint solvers, in the future I hope ViTs are so cheap to run that they can infer the right layout of things at any orientation and size in single digit milliseconds, solving the layout problem for good =)

[flagged]

Please don't respond to a bad comment, or one you feel is bad, by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

#70

Post by dang »

sunami-ai wrote: post #38
robocat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't respond to a bad comment, or one you feel is bad, by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines so badly with this account that I think we have to ban it as well. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43350269.

Post reply on HN