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Comment by apsurd | Hacker News Reader

This website makes me happy.

I've always loved noodling with CSS. After a decade+ of web dev and through making a career of web stuff I learned how much people seem to hate CSS.

I can pour countless hours into exploring and tinkering with hand rolled HTML+CSS. Deploying it just to see how it feels for real on my phone. And 99% of it all never going anywhere.

I guess for most people that's called a waste of time. Well this site sure does make my day =)

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I really like CSS. I find it easy enough to understand. It has grown in complexity over the last 10 years, but now you can do the stuff from 10 years ago a lot more simply. And all the code from 10 years ago still works.

It is more complex, but the complexity in spec can help keep codebases simpler... a lot of the new complexity takes place of some gnarly JS and CSS hacks. Looking back at my career it's hard to believe we used to build websites entirely in tables for layout.

I think it's like this: Håkon/Bert did aim a bit high with the initial design of CSS. It was harder to understand and internalize than HTML.

This hindered adoption.

Then over the years the overall complexity of the web stack (and its' Javascript-based "derivatives") grew, and suddenly CSS is no longer so complex - in comparison.

I’ve been testing out the (experimental) animation-timeline and scroll() functionality and it’s incredible.

It’s great to see new features coming to html/css that reduce or eliminate the need for JavaScript.

The more that can be done with declarative interfaces with the browser assuming the optimization and complexity instead of hand coding in JavaScript, the better.

people seem to hate CSS.

The people who are vocal about hating CSS are mostly just people who don't understand CSS.

That's perfectly OK. I don't understand APEX, or AP/L, or the framework-of-the-day. But I do understand CSS, and because of that I enjoy it quite a bit.

For some people it clicks, and for other people it doesn't.

The rub comes when someone for whom CSS doesn't click is required by their job to do things in CSS. Naturally, they hate it. I'd hate it if my job made me maintain an Active Directory installation. Not my thing. But CSS isn't inherently bad.

I think it's fun to play with, and new features are always interesting to explore. But I often get the feeling that CSS features come from a place of "Hmm, what else can we come up with?". I guess there must be a forum with serious discussions somewhere, that I am missing.

Which features do you feel are unnecessary? I mostly have the opposite reaction to new CSS features “What took them so long?”

CSS is so much better than it used to be. Many people will remember positioning things with float and display: table-cell. Every time I use modern CSS I’m like a kid in a candy store.

Mine is still pretty minimal, but I've been making a point of using more hand-rolled CSS myself to get a clearer idea of how to work outside of tools like Bootstrap and Tailwind (which I have more direct experience with in professional settings).

Coming from also writing frontends pretty much entirely with JSX (in prod, especially), my understanding of the query logic has generally improved by a lot ever since I happened into a separate rabbit hole on Web scraping.

My related hot take is that the query logic wouldn't be nearly as much of a pain if professional settings used semantic elements more. (Never mind how much bare HTML has defined behaviors you don't then have to maintain, like modals.)

> After a decade+ of web dev and through making a career of web stuff I learned how much people seem to hate CSS.

Yeah because as soon as you're not tinkering with only your particular combination of device/screen/browser/browser version/OS/OS version but have to implement something reasonably widely supported all the subtle "we're not following the specs" get really annoying to deal with.

Microsoft used to be the most notorious specs violator, today it's Apple.

I think it depends mainly on where your personal sense of curiosity sits, on the spectrum of technical and finicky problems to solve in any given project, whether you'll hate it categorically because of the variances in implementation. I'd argue more of the general hatred comes from people naively expecting visual stuff to be trivial, instead of actually harder than a lot of other software implementation details. It's evident in the UX designers (hopefully of the past) that basically brought zero technical skills to the table and had no knowledge of even why mobile-first responsive design was more than just a marginally ideal approach.

Apply some deadline pressure, and the constraints of an existing complex frontend project, and all of a sudden the estimate you pulled out of your ass for a pixel-perfect design doesn't look so achievable; ergo, CSS sucks for some people.

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