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I've been writing CSS for about 10 years at nearly every professional job I've had. I don't get 'stuck' often and generally feel competent, but I am far from an

I've been writing CSS for about 10 years at nearly every professional job I've had. I don't get 'stuck' often and generally feel competent, but I am far from an expert or a master. I think CSS is difficult to understand because there are so many ways to accomplish a task, and so many of those ways lead to (sometimes) unforeseeable consequences, and nearly all of the APIs (possibly with the exception of css grid) don't feel very coherent... in my experience. I think it is difficult to learn because there's no real apparent holistic design to really grok. I tried mdgriffith's elm-ui on a personal project and it was a breath of fresh air. It felt like an utterly excellent abstraction and I hope someone ports it to Typescript/React/JSX some day.

bobthepanda 6y ago
it also doesn't help that sometimes you have to whack-a-mole different browser implementations of the spec, and particularly if you're working on a bit of a website somebody else owns you have to be very careful about specificity, what styles other teams may be using, etc.
jacurtis 6y ago
Yeah I think working with CSS is like working with Databases. There are a lot of ways in databases to get the job done. At first glance it seems to work the way you want and even survives early testing or even deployment. It doesnt fall apart until much later when you are trying to build upon it, scale it, etc.. This causes many people to learn the wrong way to do something because they might not stick around until it falls apart. The next time they have to do something they remember the way they got it to work last time and do it again, never realizing they are leaving a trail of tears for future developers to clean up the mess with. CSS is very much the same way. I can't tell you how many times I have seen CSS files that are a house of cards. One wrong element gets added into a markup and the whole thing crumbles. Unnecessary use of !important, wildcards, overly specific, not specific enough, inconsistent media queries, desktop-first layouts (as opposed to mobile-first, or often times a mixture of the two depending on the element), and so on. At first glance, the stakes for bad CSS also seem pretty low (which is not the case with databases or backend code). This further causes developers to just hack at it until it works or is "close enough". It instills bad habits that last years or even entire careers.
- andrewingram 6y ago
  The comparison with databases is an interesting one. I have observed in both that really diving into exploiting the domain in a language-native way (e.g. CSS or SQL) can lead to extremely powerful solutions, but ones which don't integrate very neatly into a broader system. So you usually find people inventing patterns, or restricting themselves to subset -- choosing to skip some of the power in favour of maintainability. You can build an entire system in just SQL and little-to-no other programming languages, but should you?

bobthepanda 6y ago

it also doesn't help that sometimes you have to whack-a-mole different browser implementations of the spec, and particularly if you're working on a bit of a website somebody else owns you have to be very careful about specificity, what styles other teams may be using, etc.

jacurtis 6y ago

Yeah I think working with CSS is like working with Databases. There are a lot of ways in databases to get the job done. At first glance it seems to work the way you want and even survives early testing or even deployment. It doesnt fall apart until much later when you are trying to build upon it, scale it, etc.. This causes many people to learn the wrong way to do something because they might not stick around until it falls apart. The next time they have to do something they remember the way they got it to work last time and do it again, never realizing they are leaving a trail of tears for future developers to clean up the mess with. CSS is very much the same way. I can't tell you how many times I have seen CSS files that are a house of cards. One wrong element gets added into a markup and the whole thing crumbles. Unnecessary use of !important, wildcards, overly specific, not specific enough, inconsistent media queries, desktop-first layouts (as opposed to mobile-first, or often times a mixture of the two depending on the element), and so on. At first glance, the stakes for bad CSS also seem pretty low (which is not the case with databases or backend code). This further causes developers to just hack at it until it works or is "close enough". It instills bad habits that last years or even entire careers.

andrewingram 6y ago
The comparison with databases is an interesting one. I have observed in both that really diving into exploiting the domain in a language-native way (e.g. CSS or SQL) can lead to extremely powerful solutions, but ones which don't integrate very neatly into a broader system. So you usually find people inventing patterns, or restricting themselves to subset -- choosing to skip some of the power in favour of maintainability. You can build an entire system in just SQL and little-to-no other programming languages, but should you?