4 ms·

I am a designer turned developer. But long before entering development, I made websites with HTML and CSS from scratch. I have no idea why people find CSS diff

I am a designer turned developer. But long before entering development, I made websites with HTML and CSS from scratch. I have no idea why people find CSS difficult. There is the odd case which even I find cumbersome, but for most of UI development, I find creating layouts with it very natural. If you have specific questions, I can probably help.

whalesalad 8y ago
Same exact experience. I have a few theories as to why some struggle. One, I think of myself as having really great spatial awareness and reasoning abilities. I can think of a div in 2D space and imagine all of the forces acting on it to push it around. I’m a very visual person and tend to do well with stuff like this. Contrast this to complicated recursive algorithms and I can’t do it without actually drawing it with shapes and physical things. So I think of this as the proverbial right brained or left brained... some are able to visualize things better in their mind and I think those people tend to grok css better. Two, I think all of the modern tooling and libraries have stunted folks abilities to learn the fundamentals. There’s also been a paradigm shift in that, at one point, there was a much more distinctive line in the sand between frontend and backend where it was more typical to build a website that was either static or used a CMS and you spent 90% of your time living in HTML/CSS... so you could master it better. Nowadays if you find the latest tutorial or join a boot camp or whathaveyou you’re gonna a be messing with components and css-in-js, express servers, graphql etc... so it’s a lot harder for a newb to hone that skill. If you wanna know and be good at CSS you need to go back to basics and actually learn it. Text editor, style.css, index.html and a browser window.

4 ms·

I am a designer turned developer. But long before entering development, I made websites with HTML and CSS from scratch. I have no idea why people find CSS diff

by whytaka 8y ago

whalesalad 8y ago
Same exact experience. I have a few theories as to why some struggle. One, I think of myself as having really great spatial awareness and reasoning abilities. I can think of a div in 2D space and imagine all of the forces acting on it to push it around. I’m a very visual person and tend to do well with stuff like this. Contrast this to complicated recursive algorithms and I can’t do it without actually drawing it with shapes and physical things. So I think of this as the proverbial right brained or left brained... some are able to visualize things better in their mind and I think those people tend to grok css better. Two, I think all of the modern tooling and libraries have stunted folks abilities to learn the fundamentals. There’s also been a paradigm shift in that, at one point, there was a much more distinctive line in the sand between frontend and backend where it was more typical to build a website that was either static or used a CMS and you spent 90% of your time living in HTML/CSS... so you could master it better. Nowadays if you find the latest tutorial or join a boot camp or whathaveyou you’re gonna a be messing with components and css-in-js, express servers, graphql etc... so it’s a lot harder for a newb to hone that skill. If you wanna know and be good at CSS you need to go back to basics and actually learn it. Text editor, style.css, index.html and a browser window.