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FWIW my father struggled with CSS for countless years before retiring. The reasons were he never got his head around the DOM or the CSS box model and the fact t

FWIW my father struggled with CSS for countless years before retiring. The reasons were he never got his head around the DOM or the CSS box model and the fact that it all assumed you were using CSS to style a document (or more specifically, a DOM tree). He would instead want to place this/that here/there, oblivious to the fact that he was building a web page that scrolls, rather than a more familiar VB app screen that does not. Understanding the DOM, the CSS box model (and more recently, flexbox), and the above-mentioned nuance if you're coming from the app world, is more relevant than ever in our mobile-first time and age. Until you wrap your head around the notion that no, you're not styling an app screen that is fixed-sized, but are rather styling a document, you'll find CSS hard. (And yes, the real WTF is why are we using this type of tech to build UIs instead of native controls, but that's another debate.) Once you do grok that, you also need to learn to accept some quirkiness and imperfection (it is a lousy language, after all, and browser engines don't render everything the same way), and you'll find that CSS is not that hard.

onion2k 8y ago
The reasons were he never got his head around the DOM or the CSS box model and the fact that it all assumed you were using CSS to style a document (or more specifically, a DOM tree). This seems to be true of many devs who find CSS hard - there seems to be an assumption that you can take any HTML structure and use CSS to magically make it look like any design. The author of the question even lists a huge number of languages they've used over 10 years but misses out HTML as one of them. The simple fact is you can't just use CSS. To implement specific layouts you also need the right DOM structure.
baroffoos 8y ago
>He would instead want to place this/that here/there, and never really got his head around the notion that he was building a web page that scrolls, Not only that but you are building a page that displays on all kinds of screen sizes so you just have no idea how much space there is between here and there. Thats 90% of what makes CSS hard because depending on what screen you are on, you can't just put something here because here doesn't exist for everyone. I think CSS is designed fairly well its just that its solving a very complex problem of how do you make one page display on all kinds of devices without having to define layouts for them all.
shmooth 8y ago
holy shit i'm old.

onion2k 8y ago

The reasons were he never got his head around the DOM or the CSS box model and the fact that it all assumed you were using CSS to style a document (or more specifically, a DOM tree). This seems to be true of many devs who find CSS hard - there seems to be an assumption that you can take any HTML structure and use CSS to magically make it look like any design. The author of the question even lists a huge number of languages they've used over 10 years but misses out HTML as one of them. The simple fact is you can't just use CSS. To implement specific layouts you also need the right DOM structure.

baroffoos 8y ago

>He would instead want to place this/that here/there, and never really got his head around the notion that he was building a web page that scrolls, Not only that but you are building a page that displays on all kinds of screen sizes so you just have no idea how much space there is between here and there. Thats 90% of what makes CSS hard because depending on what screen you are on, you can't just put something here because here doesn't exist for everyone. I think CSS is designed fairly well its just that its solving a very complex problem of how do you make one page display on all kinds of devices without having to define layouts for them all.

shmooth 8y ago

holy shit i'm old.