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Well, CSS is pretty old, and as such old, backwards-compatible specs do, it's utterly bloated. I tend to use CSS Grid and Flex almost exclusively, since they ar

Well, CSS is pretty old, and as such old, backwards-compatible specs do, it's utterly bloated. I tend to use CSS Grid and Flex almost exclusively, since they are a lot more intuitive than the block and inline combo. But then again if you look at the origin of CSS, it all makes sense. CSS was never developed to be used for app-like interfaces. At it's inception, it was intended as a style sheet for documents (specifically scientific documents). The original idea was that everybody would have their own CSS which they could then apply to HTML locally. Interestingly, 30 years later, HTML and CSS are used for almost anything but scientific documents and nobody uses a personal style sheet. The technology is really not well suited for the cases it is most often used for today and there is a superb blog post on the topic that has featured several times on HN: The Blog Post: https://eager.io/blog/the-languages-which-almost-were-css/ https://eager.io/blog/the-languages-which-almost-were-css/ HN 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994405 HN only 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24118151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24118151

antod 6y ago
Nice blog about the early styling proposals which predate my webdev experience. For the newbies, back in the CSS 1 days, the intention was to create separate styling rules to make maintaining or changing styles easier. If you ever had to style HTML before CSS by wrapping each and every any colour or font change in HTML elements or embedding background colour attributes inside each table cell, you'll understand the pain it was addressing. The CSS 1 spec was relatively small and easy to understand - although pretty limited. I first seriously tried to make that work in the IE4 days. IE4 was almost kinda OK at CSS1, but NN4.x was just awful. Opera was (not surprisingly) the best at CSS, but nobody used it. The complex layout stuff came not log after in the much bigger CSS 2, but the nature of IE only badly implementing a fraction of it for a decade or more meant that most people just cargo culted IE work arounds and never really sat down to learn any of the principles. Not claiming they were great principles, just that there were some :)

antod 6y ago

Nice blog about the early styling proposals which predate my webdev experience. For the newbies, back in the CSS 1 days, the intention was to create separate styling rules to make maintaining or changing styles easier. If you ever had to style HTML before CSS by wrapping each and every any colour or font change in HTML elements or embedding background colour attributes inside each table cell, you'll understand the pain it was addressing. The CSS 1 spec was relatively small and easy to understand - although pretty limited. I first seriously tried to make that work in the IE4 days. IE4 was almost kinda OK at CSS1, but NN4.x was just awful. Opera was (not surprisingly) the best at CSS, but nobody used it. The complex layout stuff came not log after in the much bigger CSS 2, but the nature of IE only badly implementing a fraction of it for a decade or more meant that most people just cargo culted IE work arounds and never really sat down to learn any of the principles. Not claiming they were great principles, just that there were some :)