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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

I've been writing CSS for 25 years and still I bookmarked this link. Unless you're a masochist and keep up to date with frontend dev, there is always something new to learn. I didn't know about the `color-scheme` attribute - saves me a lot of work! Never heard of `margin-inline` either.

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It's kind of crazy how many properties there are... I've been working with CSS for a long time and have never heard of “margin-inline” either.

IMHO you should completely ignore the -inline/-block "logical" properties until you one day are making a site in traditional Mongolian or perhaps fanciful Japanese. Preparing for that day is unwise.

It does make it kind of useful to write one line centers instead of two, but at the expense of people kind of needing to learn about damn logical properties when they read your code/blog.

Fair, but skipping logical properties is just asking for trouble down the line. They make layouts way more predictable across languages and writing modes, and once you get them, simple stuff like one-line centers barely costs extra. It’s future-proofing, not overengineering.

I will feel deep burning shame in the decades hence when traditional Mongolian becomes our lingua franca and my CSS must be slightly changed

Given how many people prefer to use the 4-property shortcuts even when that doesn't make sense, teaching the 2-property shortcuts seems like a good thing, even if you don't expect to support localizations where they matter the most.

Also, in my experience they interact with Flexbox and CSS Grid in useful ways that sometimes the "logical" properties are much easier to reason with than the 4-property versions or the individual property versions.

CSS has been improving with lightning speed. If you have experience writing it, this is a golden age for applying these skills.

I love how quickly things are being added. It has really started to make up for years of stagnancy and "I wish CSS could..."

Hey, that’s a really constructive take. I appreciate you, man.

New CSS features stay relevant for the next ~25 years – well worth a learning investment IMHO.

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