Hacker News Reader

Comment by AltruisticGapHN | Hacker News Reader

CSS is becoming too complex. The syntax looks like it wants to be output by some compiler instead of being crafted by hand. Personally I also don't have any pleasure anymore writing CSS these days.

Sass and BEM methodology works fantastically well. Naming things isn't that hard, but Tailwind/utility approach is also extremely useful.

Those new features, besides container queries is just gibberish. Layer? WTF? The cascade is bad enough as it is, most devs can't even deal with the cascade it's why Tailwind become so popular. And we should dive even deeper into the cascade BS with layers and scoping and whatnpt? Again, this all looks like it was made to be output by some CSS compilers, not written by a developer.

View on HN

I’m unsure if you have specific feedback or just a general misunderstanding of the point of additions like layer to the spec.

At the end of the day these are all more tools in our toolbelt. If you want you can keep writing CSS the same way you always have.

> At the end of the day these are all more tools in our toolbelt. If you want you can keep writing CSS the same way you always have.

I don't really stand by GP's comment but I also don't think their concern can be dismissed this easily. We generally write CSS as teams. You'll have to read as much CSS as you'll have to write. Ideally you actually read more than you write so you can reuse existing rules and follow established patterns

Anyone writing CSS for a day-job, an OS project, or even just following a tutorial will have to at least familiarize themselves with these concepts

Good point, I didn't consider this.

I understand that feeling to some degree. At the same time, I think this is just how CSS has always been. Originally we had to style pages with tables and when flexbox/grid came out there were oodles of devs who refused to use them for a while. CSS is an ever-evolving toolset and I like that, but I do understand that change can feel unwarranted to some.

it's sort of weird, there have been multiple comments where people have responded as if they write CSS all by themselves and there are no colleagues to worry about, and that they also think this is an industry-wide standard!

on edit: just to note I'm generally the old guy who is pushing for people to use 'new' stuff like clamp, min, and max functions and lab color profiles, to no effect.

There is a concern that one can have too many tools to do the same -- or very similar -- things. This can reduce readability. Consider Perl's many ways approach to Python's (initial) goal of one way.

Every new release of Python 3.x further erodes this idea. I like using the new features because I find Python generally inexpressive and verbose, but I have a hard time explaining to nondevelopers who read the code about the assignment expression, keyword only arguments, structural pattern matching, typing improvements and deprecations and so on.

I’ve got the exact opposite reaction to you: the improvements to CSS are making the CSS I write simpler.

Is your complaint about the features, or the syntax?

I think the syntax is good (getting better with nested selectors)

Who cares when Sass works so well and this is just a subset of what sass does.

Maybe in 10 years time we’ll finally get to what sass can already do today.

The merits and costs of a preprocessor are unrelated to this question.

You don't have to use the new fancy features, you can keep doing things the old way.

I think he means other people will though.

Just because you don't understand it yet doesn't mean it isn't useful.

An ideal version of CSS would remove the need for SASS, BEM, and any non-thematic framework. That we have to use those right now is a problem to be fixed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com