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Comment by bigbuppo | Hacker News Reader

And the fix is another framework, because of course it's another framework. Frameworks are to CSS what greige paint is to a house. Trying to implement the missing 5% of a CSS framework without knowing how to implement "complex" CSS from the ground up means you are never implementing the missing 5%. Your site or app or whatever is just going to look like every other site that uses that framework.

Now that CSS is more or less feature complete and the fact that there's just one web browser means you don't need the clever tricks rolled up in a framework to center a div or to have a grid layout that works without resorting to tables. It's literally part of the CSS spec and has been implemented in every browser for a decade now.

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The argument I make in the book is that the last 5% of CSS/design should be written by people who can write CSS. Nobody else should even be writing CSS because it turns into a huge mess when everyone jumps in.

I mothballed this project because people were so incredibly cruel about it (a CSS project!). Remember that people who work on this stuff are people, and we're just trying to make things better. Also, you can pry .vertical-center from my cold, dead hands.

How do you expect anyone to learn CSS if they're being told to not even think about writing CSS unless they already know CSS? The whole premise demotivates learning. Experts weren't always experts. They had to start somewhere. If the world were to follow your advice, CSS would soon become dead knowledge. I am absolutely perplexed that you could write something, an act of conveying knowledge, and that you wanted to convey "don't learn this". Do you not see how weird that is?

Yep, it's weird and controversial. That's why I wrote a book explaining it and used a pseudonym.

Now: ~60% of devs know some CSS, rest feel guilty

YSAC's pitch: ~10% of devs know lots of CSS, rest avoid it without guilt (they suck and that's okay)

I guess 0% would mean a dead CSS, so it's closer to dead, sure.

If you get a more powerful saw, you can either cut down more trees or you can spend less time cutting down trees. CSS is a more powerful saw now. I'm suggesting spending less time cutting down trees instead of cutting down more trees.

Learning how to properly use a chainsaw is of use to more than just those in the logging and treecare industries. Nobody is going to call me to remove that tree that's endangering a historic building or to cutdown a few hundred acres of raw toilet paper, but I still need to understand how and when to sharpen the chain if I'm going to be cutting down trees on my own land for use as firewood.

I think you would have had significantly less blowback if you approached the subject from a positive angle. I know you were probably attempting to be humorous, but it just comes off as something wrong.

That sort of humor is best left for the experts...

It's easy to mock people who've had a failed project. I wish you success with yours.

If we didn't fail, we wouldn't learn.

lol.. I'm not sure what _you_ mean by .vertical-center but I wrote this last weekend for my latest project.

   .center { display: flex; justify-content: center; flex-direction: column; text-align:center}
   .vcenter { display: flex; justify-content: center; flex-direction: column; }
   .hcenter { text-align: center; }

Basically the same idea, yep. CASS doesn't use abbreviations or numerals though.

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