Can we stop bad-mouthing CSS in developer talks, please? | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop bad-mouthing CSS in developer talks, please?

christianheilmann.com

15 pointshalfear10 comments

The problem with CSS, as far as I'm concerned, is not that it cannot solve the task, but that it isn't intuitive and that you need to be aware of lots of 'tricks'/workarounds to get fairly simple concepts to work.

Yeah, it's hacks built on top of hacks, and even with all its complexity, it still doesn't come close to the state of the art in print layout and type-setting from centuries ago (although that's not just the fault of CSS).

But the sort of talks that the writer is talking about annoy me too. CSS is rubbish but most people know that already. It's unimaginative and lazy to constantly repeat it. However rubbish it is, we still have to deal with it for the moment.

These days I just think of CSS as a low-level language that is best left to compilers and so on. In the same way I don't want to hand-code Abstract Syntax Trees, I don't want to write CSS when I can use a higher-level alternative that spits out decent CSS.

It's not perfect but it's certainly an improvement if I think back at the time that IE6 was the dominant browser.

I worked at an e-commerce company at that time and it was corporate policy to have webpages render perfectly in all browsers. That involved a lot more workarounds and tricks then what we see and use these days... Using document mode's to trick browsers into rendering stuff different, faux columns,... .

I see a lot of younger people bitching about JavaScript and CSS but they have a lot more luxury (also regarding tools) that was available in the past. Which doesn't mean that we should stop improving the state of CSS/JS today, but to put things a bit in perspective.

Maybe someone should learn to take a joke... I consider myself a 'real' ( what does that even mean ) software developer - working on web-sites/apps since 15 years - starting my path doing web-design, adapting css as it came out... IT WAS IMPRESSIVE AND AWESOME ( because there hasn't been anything good before )...

But I have to say i am still learning and running into stuff i have done a 1000 times - unable to understand why this is working - only to uncover one statement which breaks everything... BECAUSE CSS HAS TERRIBLE INTRANSPERANT CONCEPTS AND QUIRKS ( Not all are its own faults, looking at you IE ). Also some of them have arisen because it's not used what it was made for - styling documents of text... Not all the fancy stuff we miss-use it today.

CSS is an old friend here to stay - he can for sure take a joke ( sometimes a beating ) and so should you. I usually enjoy these talks :)

I'm not bothered about people badmouthing something that really ought to have been superseded, but I really do appreciate the videos included of what appear to be good CSS practices which might help me for when I do the occasional layout for simple projects. For that, I find this a useful blog post.

Why should CSS be different from any other language ?

I think the point of the article is that people shouldn't rude about CSS because it makes web developers and designers sad. It implies a divide between them and "real" developers who sneer at something they use every day. More of a social critique than a technology critique.

And yet we have many 'web developers' constantly telling 'real' developers how Javascript is the best thing ever, and all of these 'old' languages are outdated.

Why is JSON praised, but XML shamed ? Java is old, bulky and slow, but Javascript is the answer to everything ? The debate goes both ways.

The correct answer is that all languages, etc. are suitable in the correct scenario, and none should be 'special', whether that be praised above all others, or condemned.

Then maybe the problem is that the web boxes people in and disconnects them from the most basic feature of computers: the ability to modify your tools with your tools.

This reminds me of the saying: There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

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