8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire) | Hacker News Reader

8 CSS gotchas to start your morning off right (satire)

medium.com

92 pointsisaaclyman35 comments

I was reading the first few and thinking "No... No... Hrmmm... this seems really misinformed" before it dawned on me around point 5 that the whole thing is satire.

It eases you into the realisation nice and slowly. I'm guessing given the penchant for people to comment based purely on titles, some won't even get that far.

Excellent, that's exactly the effect I was going for. My posts have about a 75% abandonment rate, though, so most of the people who hit the post probably won't stick around long enough to get the joke. Oh well.

Great article. I laughed a lot. Thanks for that!

You're welcome! Thanks for the compliment.

The satire doesn't come across very strong and makes the author look uninformed. CSS has its ups and downs but the problems faced in the article have been known and solved for years in production environments across the web. The article is basically misleading with no answer for those unaware.

Sorry if this feels harsh but reading through was fairly unpleasant.

Thanks for the feedback. I basically feel like if someone can get through number 6 without smelling the satire, perhaps they're not paying attention.

I knew it was not intended as serious before point 1. The technical stuff /code was so general and lacking specifics that it was very clear.

The satire was fantastic, I loved it. I think humour is very subjective.

I'm not sure if you read the entire article, but if not, I'd highly recommend persevering. The first few points seem completely and worryingly serious, but by the end it's absolutely blatant.

I can't decide if posting on Medium is perfect execution or the thing failing you ;)

It sure gets more hits than my MySpace profile

On number 3, that behavior is exactly what I would expect. Not sure what other logical behavior you would propose...

The other options don't make sense:

"A) Aligned horizontally with the first two, but after both of them?"

Floats are taken out of the normal flow so they will be pulled as far to the side as possible until they reach another floated element or the edge of the BFC.

"B) On the row after the first two, on the far left side?" "C) On the row after the first two, on the far right side?"

They are floated elements in the same BFC, if they fit on the same line, they will. Unless you clear them. Pretty simple stuff.

I'm mostly with you, but it seems like an antipattern to ignore HTML structure like that.

It doesn't ignore HTML structure, it ends up like it does precisely because it iterates through the structure in order when moving the boxes to either side. It makes it fairly predictable if you just loop through the structure in your head and push the boxes to the side they are floated at.

float deliberately takes elements out of content flow ("ignores HTML structure"). That's its entire thing. That's its deal. You don't want that? Don't use float.

It's satire. The most obvious behaviour was left out of the MCQ deliberately to frustrate the reader.

Well obviously it's satire, but I don't think the actual behavior was left out to frustrate the reader. The joke is that those 3 options offered would be the logical answers to the question, but the actual answer is somehow less logical than the answers offered, which I don't believe is the case.

But yes, we're probably being a little too hard on this piece, being satire and all... Then again, what else do you expect from the HN audience?

I thought the "SS" part stood for Stockholm Syndrome. Looking at some of the comments here, it seems I may have been right..

Can't say I agree with this article - I don't really run into CSS gotchas too often anymore.

This just reads like a massive complaint-fest TBH.

That's pretty much what it is. I guess my artistic goals have been accomplished, so I'll go home now

Such is Medium, often enough.

CSS is a bloody disgrace. A hideous abomination. Is there any word on the street, any alternatives coming down the road?

You should be a street preacher ;)

CSS Grid and flexbox are a nice improvement over what I had to work with in, say, 2010.

It's interesting that, in order make life livable, I don't actually write pure CSS anymore. I write Sass w/Bootstrap (and I like it). I know that it makes for a bloated stylesheet, but it beats drinking myself to death, mumbling about how the W3C failed to do their damn job.

And fail they did. Rather than hammer out an explicit standard, they just kind of winged it and left the actual implementation details to the browser builders. Those guys were never going to play nicely together, but at least we'd be able to blame someone else.

I enjoy working in CSS (or maybe I'm just oblivous of a better way/paradigmn of styling, if so please enlighten me :)) so this was a great read. Thank you!

Fantastic, thank you for making me laugh so much. Almost makes up for the years spent being tortured by CSS just so I could appreciate your tale.

You're welcome, glad it could be part of your day.

Using CSS to design software user interfaces is like using Microsoft Word and a parallel port modem to compose symphonies. I'm sure there's some awe-inspiring way to print from Word to the modem so that it produces sounds that vaguely remind you of a French horn and viola -- but it's not clear why anyone should want to use these tools to create works of such complexity, if only they had an alternative.

Agreed. If you come up with a way to write user interfaces using French horns and violas, I will start using it right away.

The one about vertical-align seems wrong. I use it all the time when aligning text next to images and that has nothing to do with tables afaik.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/vertical-al...

Yeah...I wouldn't say that "accuracy" was one of the main goals of this post per se.

Oh, sorry. I only skimmed it and missed the gist of it.

Vertical align needs to be in a table cell.

Although most of the article is satire, vertical align has a lot to do with tables. Centering only works in table-cell elements. Take a look at the code http://howtocenterincss.com/#contentType=text&horizontal=cen...

Or, one of the references mozilla links to there is: http://phrogz.net/css/vertical-align/index.html

Number 7, so many projects include bootstrap and don't even use the damn thing.

This!

I browse with uMatrix with some extra strict defaults (no 3rd-party CSS/images) and about 90% of sites that link bootstrap from a CDN work fine without.

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