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Comment by phoronixrly | Hacker News Reader

Well first of all CSS is complicated. Second, it changes constantly. Third, there are no widely-used conventions and best practices.

You are either a full-time front-end dev and have a chance to keep on top of it, or you do not know CSS, and are now blamed for it sucking.

To garner that, many people just want a simple UI that is not ugly -- not everyone wants a web design masterpiece, thus they 'don't bother learning it'.

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I don’t buy the “it changes” argument. Yes, stuff is added, but everything that worked at some point still works. Just because CSS grid was added doesn’t mean that using flexbox, or even properly using divs and box model is suddenly out of the window.

Let me ask you this then -- if you create a brand new web app UI using a table-based layout, do you consider yourself a person who 'knows CSS'?

Yes, it will work as it used to 15 years ago. You will get laughed out of a tech interview for it though.

Depends ... are you using `display: table` or are you literally using HTML instead of CSS? If you are doing the former, you know CSS. If you're doing the latter, then you haven't demonstrated that you know CSS and we'll have to talk to figure out if you know it and are avoiding it or if you just don't know it.

Table based layouts were deprecated even 15 years ago. It goes against your point that things change frequently.

> do you consider yourself a person who 'knows CSS'?

Sure. They know an older version of CSS. They don't know the latest version. Shrug....

> You will get laughed out of a tech interview for it though.

I've never laughed at anyone in an interview. Can you share some more nuances here? What's the role and expectation? How good is their code? Did they just not learn some modern designs, but can learn it quickly? What have they been working on the past few years?

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