Hacker News Reader

Comment by ktpsns | Hacker News Reader

I think some of the shown examples exhibit dark patterns in CSS authorship. For instance, unneccessary nesting happens when you use a CSS preprocessor such as LESS or SASS and basically structure/nest your CSS following the structure of your HTML (instead of writing a CSS file orthogonal to the HTML structure). That will generate bad and bloated CSS code which is slow. This habit exists since >10yrs (as LESS/SASS date back for around ~>10yrs).

View on HN

The amount of trouble and complication front end devs make for themselves because they refuse to learn CSS is incredible. I've literally heard people call it "raw CSS" as if they were toggling in instructions on the front panel of a minicomputer.

Backend developers can be even worse - I’m thinking of someone who had a Very Serious Java framework they used in business apps, which generated many thousands of lines of redundant CSS basically styling every element so they could avoid learning how selectors or positioning worked. The best part was that this was a bottleneck for every project but they kept insisting it was easier.

It’s a question of respect: if you think CSS is a toy language for your inferiors, you probably aren’t going to learn it very well because you’re not going to be receptive to learning the designers’ intent.

I've never heard "raw CSS" with that connotation. I've usually heard it used to point out that they're writing .css files that are getting directly referenced and aren't getting generated or compiled in a build pipeline, because CSS with extra tooling is so common (for good productivity reasons) these days.

As CSS is a declarative non-turing-complete (in any practical sense) language without any specification for performance details, it’s a job of a CSS engine to care about performance of CSS written in this or that way. Blaming developers for not being aware, bothered or disciplined enough to Use It Properly is antitethical to its design and nature.

That doesn't imply you shouldn't use the existing features of the tool to your advantage. I get the lack of spec, but this isn't 2001 anymore. You can create rules in accordance to general relationships, and not strictly parent child ones.

What if you don’t want general relationships and instead design specific blocks as desired? Coincidentally similar geometry doesn’t mean that it must become a local standard with a name and be factored out. It’s actually a bad practice named “fragile base class”.

This is totally it. Less is where I developed a complete aversion to nesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com