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I've just started playing around with CSS after a seven year break from web programming and have the opposite impression. The two biggest additions I've seen ar

I've just started playing around with CSS after a seven year break from web programming and have the opposite impression. The two biggest additions I've seen are flexbox and grid both of which massively decrease the cognitive load—compared to past options, it almost feels like cheating. Moreover, they do this by consciously not building on top of past layout features but instead doing their own thing. CSS is still a mess of random features that can't be cleanly composed or extended—it's the complete opposite of a language that can grow[1]—but it's a more usable mess than it used to be. [1]: Wonderful talk on language design by Guy Steele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

naasking 4y ago
> CSS is still a mess of random features that can't be cleanly composed or extended The lack of orthogonality and composability has always been the core issue. It's definitely better now, and atomic CSS makes this pretty close to simple.
alwillis 4y ago
CSS is still a mess of random features that can't be cleanly composed or extended If you separate old CSS from new CSS, it’s not so bad. Yes, CSS has some technical debt from the olden times (like any programming language does) but these days, you need less and less of the old stuff. For example, all of the alignment stuff created originally for Flexbox (justify-content, align-items, justify-self, etc.) were broken out in their own specification [1] and now CSS Grid and any future specification uses the same terminology to describe how to align something in a box. Instead of every color model having it's own syntax, which is how CSS started, there's now color functions that can specify any color in any color space [2]. [1]: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-align/ https://drafts.csswg.org/css-align/ [2]: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-5/#color-function https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-5/#color-function

naasking 4y ago

> CSS is still a mess of random features that can't be cleanly composed or extended The lack of orthogonality and composability has always been the core issue. It's definitely better now, and atomic CSS makes this pretty close to simple.

alwillis 4y ago

CSS is still a mess of random features that can't be cleanly composed or extended If you separate old CSS from new CSS, it’s not so bad. Yes, CSS has some technical debt from the olden times (like any programming language does) but these days, you need less and less of the old stuff. For example, all of the alignment stuff created originally for Flexbox (justify-content, align-items, justify-self, etc.) were broken out in their own specification [1] and now CSS Grid and any future specification uses the same terminology to describe how to align something in a box. Instead of every color model having it's own syntax, which is how CSS started, there's now color functions that can specify any color in any color space [2]. [1]: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-align/ https://drafts.csswg.org/css-align/ [2]: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-5/#color-function https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-5/#color-function