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Even grayer beard's 5c (well, I'm still under 40, but still): You could not pay me enough to learn CSS. Every time I have to debug CSS there go many valuable h

Even grayer beard's 5c (well, I'm still under 40, but still): You could not pay me enough to learn CSS. Every time I have to debug CSS there go many valuable hours of my life. With an insane amount of trial and error and judicious use of Chrome's dev tools I can usually hack some garbage together, until the next time I have to figure out how to remove the background of a button. In the literal 90s I was building fully-featured GUI programs by dragging and dropping buttons and text boxes and inputs onto windows with Visual Basic, and the window resized nicely. Thirty years later I have to do the same thing with gazillions of arcane style sheets. It's a disaster. How did it get this way?

cosmotic 3y ago
> How did it get this way? Users were enamored by custom drawn UIs, so designers started demanding custom drawn UIs instead of native widgets. Most users don't understand what they lost and now pawing at interfaces to discover how they work is the new norm.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
Don't forget that every few years, some new styling standard comes out. Forget tables, everything is floating divs. Forget floating divs, it's flexbox now. Forget flexbox, we're using columns.
MR4D 3y ago
> It's a disaster. How did it get this way? It’s called “progress” apparently, and older gray beards complained about it when we reinvented the mainframe through the same methodology. For all of the re-use that us computer folks talk about, we surely reinvent the wheel an awful lot. I’m guessing that we have some sort of stubborn creative streak that causes it all. That’s my excuse at least.
_0w8t 3y ago
There are plenty of web site builders that allow for a drag-and-drop construction. But people who use them are not programmers. I.e. programming is not supposed to be easy. So if one sticks to it, the problem has to be hard at least from the management point of view.
stickfigure 3y ago
I'm 50 and spent most of the 90s building Windows GUI apps. I think you misremember it. As a general rule dialogs (especially the ones built with dialog builders) were static with fixed pixels sizes; double the screen resolution and the dialogs were half-size. Layouts were extremely static; even Java AWT's primitive flow layouts were almost revolutionary by comparison to what was available in MFC et al. Modern web design is a mess, yes, but it's vastly more sophisticated than what was available in the 90s and I would not choose to go back.

cosmotic 3y ago

> How did it get this way? Users were enamored by custom drawn UIs, so designers started demanding custom drawn UIs instead of native widgets. Most users don't understand what they lost and now pawing at interfaces to discover how they work is the new norm.

pavel_lishin 3y ago

Don't forget that every few years, some new styling standard comes out. Forget tables, everything is floating divs. Forget floating divs, it's flexbox now. Forget flexbox, we're using columns.

MR4D 3y ago

> It's a disaster. How did it get this way? It’s called “progress” apparently, and older gray beards complained about it when we reinvented the mainframe through the same methodology. For all of the re-use that us computer folks talk about, we surely reinvent the wheel an awful lot. I’m guessing that we have some sort of stubborn creative streak that causes it all. That’s my excuse at least.

_0w8t 3y ago

There are plenty of web site builders that allow for a drag-and-drop construction. But people who use them are not programmers. I.e. programming is not supposed to be easy. So if one sticks to it, the problem has to be hard at least from the management point of view.

stickfigure 3y ago

I'm 50 and spent most of the 90s building Windows GUI apps. I think you misremember it. As a general rule dialogs (especially the ones built with dialog builders) were static with fixed pixels sizes; double the screen resolution and the dialogs were half-size. Layouts were extremely static; even Java AWT's primitive flow layouts were almost revolutionary by comparison to what was available in MFC et al. Modern web design is a mess, yes, but it's vastly more sophisticated than what was available in the 90s and I would not choose to go back.