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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

genuine question as a non front end engineer- do you recommend reading the CSS spec as a reference guide? im basically asking whether someone learning to be good in CSS should read the spec or pick up one of the recommended books (that appear from time to time on HN).

For example, i never had to read the spec for ruby to get jruby to work.

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There may or may not be Great CSS books out there, but in 10 years, I never found any. They invariably teach you recipes, but not how to to think in the terms the language was designed.

The ruby community is one of the most active and rigorously analyzed in contemporary programming. Blog articles are well vetted, and Google search can reliably point you to decent articles. Further, ruby belongs to a class of languages (interpreted, general purpose, imperative/OO) that is very well understood. Languages from this broader ecosystem include python, perl and even JavaScript, all contributing to a deeper analysis of each.

CSS is a stylesheet system. There are no other popular systems in use. The comparison could be made to Microsoft Word's style system (which has a very different conceptual model). Such a comparison could yield interesting ideas. But such a comparison is never made. Other stylesheet languages for structured documents include the unknown FOSI and DSSSL. When was the last time anyone cited those referenced in a blog post, tutorial, or book about CSS?

I'm not saying the specs are a good teaching device either. But teaching and precise description are different ends. Regardless, because there doesn't exist a good community (incl blogs, books, personalities) to fall back on, the specs are your best bet. Ultimately, they (along with other implementations) are what inform browser implementations.

Would you consider writing a post that explains the high-level (conceptual) differences between CSS, DSSL, FOSI and Word?

I'll admit I haven't read the CSS spec, but I have been reading the canvas element spec in detail, as there's little good, deep reference material for it. It's readable, or at least understandable, but it's challenging compared to more traditional reference books (like MDN's presentation, for example).

Does ruby even have a proper spec?

yes - http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_...

there are other community-driven sources - like RubySpec [1], etc. but this is the (expensive!!) ISO standard.

FYI - I had intended it as an example. I'm really interested to know if the most effective way to work with CSS is to understand its spec... which is not the way it works with most programming languages.

But perhaps CSS is more similar to a rulebook (declarative) than a language.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubySpec

I think generally speaking, reading the spec is useful when trying to figure out the details of more complex topics, I think this holds true for most languages. I used to pull out the C spec regularly, and even the c++ draft spec on occasion, it gets better for smaller languages, for Scheme for instance, I would pull out the spec rather quite often.

Since I imagine the CSS spec is relatively small (compared to say C++) I imagine it would be useful for solving more adavnced use cases.

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