benfrain

I'm central UK and had the exact same thought when I saw these announced — it would be a brave soul who wears these where I grew up!

Ha, you kids! What about the REAL project that kicked off atomic styling: https://acss.io pioneered by Thierry Koblentz and friends while at Yahoo.

Everything that came since is just a variant, in principle, of that. It never gets the props!

Forgive me if this comes across condescending or patronising. Genuinely not my intent...

So many people reach for a solution without really understanding their own problem.

I'm talking specifically about maintainable code. And maintainable CSS code at that.

For scaling CSS imagine a continuum with complete isolation one end (BEM, ECSS et al) and complete abstraction at the other (started with 'Atomic CSS', which then spawned countless others including Tailwind).

My experience is that either end of that continuum leads to an approach that can scale well and be maintainable. Mixing of approaches is where people come unstuck because they don't understand why that is problematic.

Understanding that fundamental (more here: https://css-tricks.com/scaling-css-two-sides-of-a-spectrum/) goes a long way to dealing with the problem.

My preference is isolation (which I detailed at https://ecss.io and in the book 'Enduring CSS' about 5 years back — not mentioned to pimp myself, I don't give a hoot if you buy/read)). I like code that is easy to reason about and delete (I like deleting code far more than writing it!) and that suits my mental model.

I also believe our job as a front-end developer is to accommodate designs, not turn around and say, "sorry, we don't have a class for 8px margin, it will have to be 5px or 10px". I'm not suggesting this or that framework can't accommodate this need, just highlighting why I feel the way I do and choose the solution I do.

Think about how __you__ want to build and maintain code. Don't just jump on something because everyone else does. Analyse your problem. Where are your actual pain points. Find the solution to your own issues. Otherwise you'll just swap one set of problems for another.

A framework may very well meet your needs. And by all means listen to others extolling its virtues but that will not save you from a lack of due diligence!

[ends attempting to dispense fatherly advice]

Everything they said! Rendering is shockingly bad at times. Try running some transforms on SVG with CSS or WAAPI and it’s laughably bad. The dev tools are all but useless. Just simple things like adding a new prop/value to a selector declaration is horrid and often inadvertently removed a different declaration. The JS perf is great but the debugging stepper is virtually opaque with buttons with no labels and the like. Let’s not even get started on the raft of web platform features it either doesn’t have yet or has no intention of adding.

I too would like to use Safari but it’s so far behind evergreen browsers like FF and Chrome I just can’t rely on it.

Sketch performance feels like a web app. Figma feels native. On every platform. Go figure.

Jamstack is nice locally but doesn’t have a solid solution to something simple like comments. WordPress is horrid to develop with locally but can do almost anything.

Choose your poison.

Just wondering if others suffer with a similar affliction!

Is this any different to Ethan Marcotte’s technique written from back in April?

https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/css-grid-without-max-width/

Used that one myself here: https://rwd.education

I’d like to see it pushed out to dnf repositories. Loathe to do a manual install and then have to do an install in a few days via dnf. Still the 68 branch showing in Fedora

Yes, the title is ‘the ideal tech stack for a development blog...’ I consider commenting functionality an essential component of a tech blog so was hoping that was solved in the post. It isn’t, and it hardly ever is but I wish there were more choices in this regard

Speed and elegance.

Scans to see how he is dealing with native comments... Realises the issue remains unsolved, along with 99% of ’CMS’ solutions... Continues with Wordpress.

Anyone else wonder what kind of horrors are currently frozen down there. I’m thinking smallpox and other problems we believed were gone for good.

Some nice updates but I admit I was just skipping down to the part where I could style them. For developers, there’s little we can do with this. You’ve changed them. They are better but imagine devs will get a whole lot more excited when we can more easily visually bend them to the needs of our projects/apps. Do you have a vague idea when that should be?

“It’s all about the comments”. All these static site generators are fine but they can’t deal with comments. Then you have to add a commenting system from a 3rd party, at which point you may well wish you’d just gone with a PHP/DB solution from the beginning

Didn’t this come out a couple of years ago? Is there a reason we are seeing it again now?

Native comment system yet?

I’m also never sure when I read these things; is the amount of CO2 listed for a flight split between the number of passengers?

Firefox is a great browser. However, the reason I end up back on Chrome is because neither iOS or Android have Firefox as the default browser. Sadly, as a front-end focused dev life is easier to build stuff out for Chrome and to a lesser extent, Safari because you know that’s the rendering engine the vast majority of your users will see. I’d happily opt for Safari, as I respect Safaris ethos (privacy, speed, battery perf etc) but their dev tools are lacking so many basic features. Bugs like this don’t help: https://mobile.twitter.com/benfrain/status/11311423923866419...

Pedantic point. It’s ‘Sass’ and not ‘SASS’.

Sass certainly pushed things forward in CSS world. Without Sass and LESS, Stylus et al. I am quite certain we wouldn’t have CSS custom properties and colour functions. Great additions to the language.

That said, I left Sass specifically some years ago. https://benfrain.com/breaking-up-with-sass-postcss/

Tangentially related — in terms of dealing with CSS tooling/output for large projects with many devs I have found the PostCSS ecosystem indispensable.

I wrote this a few years back after setting things up with PostCSS at bet365.com this way: http://ecss.io/chapter9.html

The good thing about PostCSS is you can reduce the features as CSS becomes more capable and easily incorporate extra tooling like autoprefixer.

VS Code has some good features and rapid iteration but it is slow. Slow to start, slow to render pages when you switch tabs.

Sublime Text may not have BBedits ability with massive files but for 99% of the time it is lightning quick and rock solid.

As such, I think a natively coded Mac editor could nail the requisite speed but also enjoy some novel features beyond the spartan default environment of Sublime.

I’m looking forward to it.

Dank Mono. Ligatures, crossed zero and crazy italics for comments and the like: https://dank.sh

I made a free to use PWA for organising team games. No connection needed: https://io.benfrain.com

I tried the utility approach many years ago and while I can see the appeal in some situations I think it’s far from a panacea. My journey led to me writing http://ECSS.io The opposite way of tackling CSS at scale. Instead of abstraction I opted for isolation.

The comments on a blog post are often as useful as the post itself. They are also directly related to the content of the post. Why would I want that information stored anywhere else but with the post itself? Especially with a 3rd party? To say conversation can be done with other services just seems like passing the buck to me.

I’m amazed no-one has mentioned the lack of a built-in commenting feature.

The makers of Ghost are here appreciating the benefits of comments but sadly they haven’t made there way to Ghost yet.

I’d love to move to Ghost from Wordpress but commenting is essential.

And no. 3rd party Garbage like Disqus isn’t a viable option.