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Comment by riggsdk | Hacker News Reader

I spent waaay too long trying to figure out why my CSS rule didn't work. It doesn't accept me to overwrite an already existing one. The rules did not specify this at all. It is not clear that the game wants me to find another rule that fixes the problem instead of adding a single perfectly valid line of CSS that does it. There is a huge difference between those two. CSS being cascading meaning that any CSS property coming after an initial rule will overwrite the previous one (in part or fully). It would be really nice if the game would tell me if the rule I added wasn't allowed instead of just silently failing to do anything with no feedback.

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I thought the site was broken for the exact same reason. Instead of being a troubleshooting / practice type test it's more of a puzzle that I do not care to solve.

You can still play that way if you want. Just open your browser's dev tools and edit the CSS rules inside the dev tools. Once you have them overlapping, you just need to do something to trigger the victory check which can be accomplished by doing basically anything (resize the window, click on a circle, type something, I haven't found any action that doesn't trigger the victory check yet).

Exactly what I did to the first one. `left: 12xxpx` did it. Then I got back here to check if I am only one dumb enough to not understand why it does not work.

I ran into the same thing and just quit. I would have greatly appreciated this little piece of feedback in the UI.

Yea I found that stupid as well. I opened the inspector and did it there and it accepted my answer. I decided not to continue afterwards.

Same, because of the lack of feedback I genuinely thought it didn't work. Especially considering the fact many editing things don't work (double click doesn't select, cmd+(shift+)arrows doesn't work, etc.)

It's a perfect representation of CSS: it looks and feels like it should do what you need, but it doesn't _technically_ do what it's supposed to do, so you spend a few hours _trying_ to make sense of it, falling back to just random fuzzing and trial and error, before concluding it's all broken and finally accepting it in its current wonky form, trusting that in some browser, somewhere, it works.

HTML -> JSX

CSS -> Tailwind

JS -> Typescript

It must be maddening working as a browser dev knowing that the very first thing most devs worth their corn do is immediately go to abstracts so they are able ignore your work as much as they can.

I feel however that trendy tech is moving closer to the browser.

Previously we had things like CoffeeScript, HAML, Pug, SASS/SCSS.

Tailwind is just plain CSS classes and the code generation step is just an optimisation.

For TS there is a proposal for adding type annotations to Javascript. Dunno how far it is, though.

JSX is the odd one out but still closer to HTML than things like HAML, which also had embedded logic but looked nothing like HTML.

I'm pretty good at handling the cascade and knowing how things work, so this experience you are describing is not mine where CSS is concerned, I doubt I've had to do several hours of trying to make sense of any CSS for probably 5-6 years.

As such that the game does not actually allow you to use the cascade as it should be used is a downside.

"I understand cascading and so I know it isn't what should be done with Cascading StyleSheets. It is right this tool to simulate CSS doesn't support CSS' nominative feature "

I'm glad we agree CSS is unintuitive on many unique and creative fronts.

C++ I can do.

CSS I leave to masochists.

Ah just assumed it was broken, found the dev tools 'hack' Game is very much missing an intro

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