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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I have this strong emotion of comfort associated with just knowing a project or problem can be solved. Whether it’s programming or renovating my home, I seek confirmation that every sub-task can be done before I embark on the project. This usually requires little experiments.

Being able to totally override anything in Python (but rarely ever doing so) gives me that comfort.

Seeing a small section of my back deck totally renovated before doing the actual project gives me that comfort.

Having a million css options that I’ll rarely use gives me that comfort.

I dunno if others have this feeling? For me it’s not just rational or preparatory, it’s emotionally driven. I feel anxious about a project until I know I have all the tools and parts to complete it, even if inefficiently.

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The thing that gives me incomfort is the knowledge that we have a turing-complete language to manage display preferences.

I feel that there has to be a better way.

But isn’t that argument just an organizational one? You don’t have to use the parts you don’t want.

And narrowing the toolset is impossible without dictating terms to others on what tools they don’t get.

One loose analogy is that 99% of stuff in Home Depot I won’t need. But it all makes my walk a bit longer and makes finding stuff harder and there’s probably some tools I didn’t know about that would make my life easier. But should I advocate that a lot of it should be eliminated?

The thing that gives me incomfort is the knowledge that we have a turing-complete language to manage display preferences.

It’s not accurate to imply what CSS does is only “managing display preferences”.

CSS is the presentation (color, layout, typography, animation, speech) and state management layer for HTML and SVG, among other markup languages.

I much rather have agreed upon specifications instead of having to invent hacks and work arounds for things that should be standard in 2022.

It took 20+ years to get layout based on columns and rows (CSS Grid); before that, layout comprised of hacks (floats, absolute positioning) and features being misused, like tables.

Container queries, CSS Nesting and the parent selector—-:has()—-results in less and easier to understand code with fewer hacks. It also means doing more without reaching for JavaScript.

CSS is in a good place finally and I for one hope it continues.

I have had multiple conversations with multiple devs about it being ok to use a table tag when the display is an actual table i.e. columns and rows of data with headers etc. It’s semantically correct! One occasion was for a project wherein the lead rejected my code because I used a table tag for tabular data. I was told to use floating divs instead.

I guess the point of my story is that people will misuse tools regardless of what is available to them.

I should also mention that these new CSS features enable developers the option to stop using CSS frameworks that are often bloated with features you may not need or want.

Back in the day, developers would use a CSS framework just to manage grid issues, which had their own limitations.

With CSS Grid, we do things that were difficult or impossible with much less code.

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