Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design | Hacker News Reader

Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design

betaversion.org

106 pointsurlwolf31 comments

You still shouldn't use @import, which is a designer sucking programming. @import can cause FOUC as well as slowing down page render a lot.

As a reference:

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/09/dont-use-import/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=559804

I had a good chuckle when that was essentially the first tip.

dup http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345782

What is this, digg? So what if it's a duplicate? I am here to discuss with fellow HNers as much as for reading interesting articles.

Also, I joined only 133 days ago, long after this article was on the front page.

It's good to know about dupes. If nothing else, if you're interested in the article you can read the HN comments on the other page.

True, good point. You still lack the ability to discuss, though.

Yes one should be able to subscribe to one topic even if one didn't enter into to discussion.

The OP was informing the audience that this was submitted before. This is useful so that those who have seen it already (the majority) can recognize it and possibly move on, and others could go read up on the previous comments - accumulating knowledge rather than rehashing it is the basic tenet of progress.

Kindly calm down and refrain from acting out based on things you have imagined the post says.

Permalink just in case... http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/

"Some browsers ship with default stylesheets that are simply horrible. One notorious problem, for example, is the <table> tag that forgets to inherit font settings from its parents."

That's not 'bumbling browser makers can't create sensible default stylesheets', that's 'pages in quirks mode duplicate the oddities of Netscape 4 as closely as possible'. Use a DOCTYPE that triggers standards mode, validate your HTML and you'll find a lot of CSS things get much easier.

The post actually contained some very good tips for any beginning designer, although the title does the article a disservice ("Why Do Web Designers Suck at Programming?")

I am REALLY tired of these "why x suck at y" articles. Are these bloggers so devoid of inspiration or creativity? Honestly I find this particular title offensive as I'm a programmer who is frequently forced to fix the broken CSS of so-called "designers".

Because some do not care enough about other users' experience -- like didn't bother submitting the proper permalink at the bottom of the page.

Blame the website designer as much as the submitter. Submitters shouldn't have to think about "permalinks".

Programmers suck at design because it isn't programming, it's design.

For color picking, HSV is very much better than RGB. With HSV though, I still don't have a good intuition for Saturation VS Value tuning so it seems there could be an even better color system.

Munsell appears to be that system, however there doesn't seem to be any public description of it that would allow one to implement it so you have to use some proprietary crap. I think that's a real loss for humanity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSV_color_space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell

My experience is that the same programmers who suck at CSS design, are the same who suck at GUI design, and the same who suck at creating modular code , and the same who hardly ever indent their code, and the same who write spaghetti code,

... and the same programmers who thinks that if it runs, its good ... and the same who are just not good programmers.

Think about it, if you are a generally good programmer, you would never create a bad UI, CSS or otherwise! ... Linus Torvalds as far as I know don't create UIs, he is a very good programmer too

Let's face it. CSS design is a visual art, and not every programmer is good at it. You either have it or don't. I have seen many programmers who do a fine job with CSS.

I think the article nailed it in that most programmers think they aren't any good because they have no clue where to start. With no training and a non-obvious technique (and perhaps some intimidation at trying and failing), programmers just say "I can't do it."

I would bet most programmers could do an OK job at designing things (at least, not painful :). But great design is still talent that has to be worked at, and I think it is hard for anybody to get to that point without devoting him/herself to it (and probably having innate talent as well).

I fit the stereotype. compass has saved me http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/tree/master

With compass I get a programmer's mindset and lots of predefined typography goodness. It still takes lots of work, but I have been able to produce a clean site now.

In the article he mentions using @import over LINK due to some convoluted logic about "easier to re-use". LINK and @import behave exactly the same, except the well-known performance issues. Why should we trust someone who doesn't actually understand browsers?

LINK and @import don't behave the same. LINK styles are evaluated in document order. Evaluation of @import styles is deferred until the end of the document.

See my caveat: "well-known performance issues".

They're not semantically the same either though so it's not just a performance issue.

Give your page some air

Always my biggest problem. Being a natural maximizer (as many programmers are), I can't stand non-performing real estate. It's taking me a long time to understand that white space is performing, just not the same way that code performs.

Maybe you should use Python more often - then white space does perform!

I tend to think of the anti-pattern of this: Jira. That always makes it easy for me to open my pages up.

What works for me is to think that white space isn't "empty space" but instead "space filled with white".

Programmers don't suck at CSS Design, it's Stefano's stereotype of programmers that do.

great tips!

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