Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Meanwhile, more than one web developer has communicated to me in private that they hate CSS and barely understand it after years of using it professionally to make money

They barely even understand it?? I think the biggest problem with CSS is the same problem plaguing C++ and other older languages. Cruft. If there was proper versioning and pieces of the language were deprecated in favor of modern techniques, it would remove a lot of ambiguity. Heck, if there was a built-in linter that warned you about common errors that would be a massive upgrade!

The only bad part about CSS is that there’s a dozen ways to do everything.

With that said, any developer telling you they hate it probably hasn’t worked with the “state of the art” in other UI development. Go work with WPF, UWP, QT, ImGui, JavaFX, Swing, or any of the dozens of other desktop UI frameworks. Then, try to make a moderately complex style and apply it to several elements. It’s a PITA. I too hated CSS… but then I worked with WPF and JavaFX and lots of those other frameworks: and they gave me a fresh dose of perspective.

I’ll gladly take the ability to do everything a dozen different ways over the inability to do anything that strays from the happy path in the framework I’m using.

JavaFX uses a dialect of CSS so that's not necessarily a great example. It's also somewhat simplified compared to normal CSS, for example, the way layout works is more normal for GUIs (containers that implement different constraint systems). For things like theming your UI it works pretty well.

I've done web CSS and JavaFX CSS and for app GUI I'd much rather use the latter. For nicely styled documents with good typography on the other hand, web CSS is going to be better.

JavaFX also scores points for having a binary form of CSS that can be loaded and parsed much faster.

CSS as a language is bloody awful of course. The prevalence of dialects that compile down to it is always a giveaway that the language didn't keep pace with people's needs.

I misspoke in my comment and must have used Swing more than JavaFX (I’ve used both, but forgot which one I primarily used, this was 8 or 9 years ago and a short job). Either way, I really don’t like when only a subset of the language is supported, because then it becomes a constant guessing game of whether or not something is supported. In the case of JavaFX, there are a few features not supported and a couple gotchas mentioned in their docs.

And I think vanilla CSS is not that bad. I definitely don’t think it’s bloody awful. Most wrappers around the language added variables and nesting. CSS now supports variables and I think it even supports nesting :)

There’s probably other features that could be good, but for a language that’s just meant to provide style metadata for my UI, CSS works fine.

It's not really a subset, more like a dialect. It has some features that web CSS doesn't, for instance. Some things like animations use the same ideas and APIs but there just isn't a CSS DSL for it, you code up timelines and keyframes in the host language (usually but not always Java).

The problems with CSS are more around the high levels of inconsistency, difficulty making it fast, lack of modularity and the fact that if you make a mistake either nothing happens with no error, or you get visual corruption. It's just an extremely frustrating technology to work with, especially if you only use it occasionally. Although the article talks about font metrics a lot, a big part of why centering things is so hard is thanks to CSS and its legacy which is why it opens with that. Every time I do web design I discover that the current best practice has changed, and there are dozens of new properties with similar names to existing properties which don't seem to work or can only be used in combination with other properties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com