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> This is a set of chapters about CSS layout for people who already know CSS. Which seems like a small market, I admit. This was like a gut punch. Is this why

> This is a set of chapters about CSS layout for people who already know CSS. Which seems like a small market, I admit. This was like a gut punch. Is this why software is so terrible? So many people just graduated bootcamps and never learned anything else? How can you do web development or even React if you don't understand CSS?

codethief 3y ago
> How can you do web development or even React if you don't understand CSS? I wrote my first line of CSS more than 20 years ago, have dug my way through CSS specs and browser quirks a countless number of times, write a ton of CSS in my day job, and even I wouldn't claim to really understand CSS. There are just too many hidden rules, too many edge cases, to really ever be certain you have now understood everything there is to understand. EDIT: I mean, consider this guy's recent blog post[0] for instance. He claims that CSS is logical and, presumably, that he understands that logic. Yet his article contains a number of factual errors, as mentioned in the HN comments. Nevertheless, he writes about CSS on a regular basis, so I'm sure he understands a great deal about it. In other words: In the world of CSS, even experts and experienced veterans are prone to not understand everything in detail. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39334685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39334685
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >I wrote my first line of CSS more than 20 years ago, have dug my way through CSS specs and browser quirks a countless number of times, write a ton of CSS in my day job, and even I wouldn't claim to really understand CSS. There are just too many hidden rules, too many edge cases, to really ever be certain you have now understood everything there is to understand. Complete ditto. Been using it daily for a decade plus, and I could literally lay out a page perfectly while blindfolded at this point. But I would never claim to be a CSS "expert". Simply too many gotchas.
- dylan604 3y ago
  > he writes about CSS on a regular basis, so I'm sure he understands a great deal about it. Don't be so sure. The world is full of people that excel at the fake it til you make it skill. As long as you say it loud and full of confidence, people will just tend to accept whatever you're saying. Anyone that comes along and challenges will just be dismissed as a hater or similar. In software dev, these types tend to migrate upwards into management
nsinreal 3y ago
Because understanding of CSS doesn't helps you in the most cases. Just return to the ages when we needed to support Chrome+Safari+Firefox+IE+custom mobile browsers (it wasn't long ago). All those engines had so many bugs. Understanding CSS won't help you deal with cross-browser compatibility. This is why we have things like caniuse.com and autoprefixer. Go a little more back in time. CSS doesn't have a lot of capabilities. Some things can't be achieved at all. Other things can be done quickly via mix of CSS and JS code to update layout; otherwise you need to spend a week to achieve something worse with pure CSS. Even now, we have things like react-motion, react-transition-group - libraries to solve cases that CSS transitions&animations can't solve. (Should we talk about DND?) In past CSS didn't had Flex-layout widely adopted. This is why there were JS libraries solving layout stuff. We still have libraries that provide list virtualization. Even with the CSS `contain` property (which arrived in 2017 and wasn't widely adopted even in 2021), working with DOM is not cheap. We didn't have calc() and CSS variables. We still don't have CSS nesting widely adopted. This is why we have LESS & SASS. (Should we talk about CSS modules?) And ofc, CSS is pretty useless for quick prototyping, you need a UI kit. UI kit means a conceptually different approach than using raw CSS - you don't need to do CSS a lot, but you need to learn UI kit a lot. Finally, if you are building a product, you deal not only with styling. It's not a landing page, it's not a one week hobbie project -> you need to code a lot. If you are bad at styling, you are bad at ~10% (maybe ~20%) of your work. And considering all the things that we said before, if you are bad at understanding CSS, you are bad at ~1% of your work. To sum up. You can make beautiful products with little CSS knowledge because CSS alone is useless.

codethief 3y ago

> How can you do web development or even React if you don't understand CSS? I wrote my first line of CSS more than 20 years ago, have dug my way through CSS specs and browser quirks a countless number of times, write a ton of CSS in my day job, and even I wouldn't claim to really understand CSS. There are just too many hidden rules, too many edge cases, to really ever be certain you have now understood everything there is to understand. EDIT: I mean, consider this guy's recent blog post[0] for instance. He claims that CSS is logical and, presumably, that he understands that logic. Yet his article contains a number of factual errors, as mentioned in the HN comments. Nevertheless, he writes about CSS on a regular basis, so I'm sure he understands a great deal about it. In other words: In the world of CSS, even experts and experienced veterans are prone to not understand everything in detail. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39334685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39334685

ramesh31 3y ago
>I wrote my first line of CSS more than 20 years ago, have dug my way through CSS specs and browser quirks a countless number of times, write a ton of CSS in my day job, and even I wouldn't claim to really understand CSS. There are just too many hidden rules, too many edge cases, to really ever be certain you have now understood everything there is to understand. Complete ditto. Been using it daily for a decade plus, and I could literally lay out a page perfectly while blindfolded at this point. But I would never claim to be a CSS "expert". Simply too many gotchas.
dylan604 3y ago
> he writes about CSS on a regular basis, so I'm sure he understands a great deal about it. Don't be so sure. The world is full of people that excel at the fake it til you make it skill. As long as you say it loud and full of confidence, people will just tend to accept whatever you're saying. Anyone that comes along and challenges will just be dismissed as a hater or similar. In software dev, these types tend to migrate upwards into management

nsinreal 3y ago

Because understanding of CSS doesn't helps you in the most cases. Just return to the ages when we needed to support Chrome+Safari+Firefox+IE+custom mobile browsers (it wasn't long ago). All those engines had so many bugs. Understanding CSS won't help you deal with cross-browser compatibility. This is why we have things like caniuse.com and autoprefixer. Go a little more back in time. CSS doesn't have a lot of capabilities. Some things can't be achieved at all. Other things can be done quickly via mix of CSS and JS code to update layout; otherwise you need to spend a week to achieve something worse with pure CSS. Even now, we have things like react-motion, react-transition-group - libraries to solve cases that CSS transitions&animations can't solve. (Should we talk about DND?) In past CSS didn't had Flex-layout widely adopted. This is why there were JS libraries solving layout stuff. We still have libraries that provide list virtualization. Even with the CSS `contain` property (which arrived in 2017 and wasn't widely adopted even in 2021), working with DOM is not cheap. We didn't have calc() and CSS variables. We still don't have CSS nesting widely adopted. This is why we have LESS & SASS. (Should we talk about CSS modules?) And ofc, CSS is pretty useless for quick prototyping, you need a UI kit. UI kit means a conceptually different approach than using raw CSS - you don't need to do CSS a lot, but you need to learn UI kit a lot. Finally, if you are building a product, you deal not only with styling. It's not a landing page, it's not a one week hobbie project -> you need to code a lot. If you are bad at styling, you are bad at ~10% (maybe ~20%) of your work. And considering all the things that we said before, if you are bad at understanding CSS, you are bad at ~1% of your work. To sum up. You can make beautiful products with little CSS knowledge because CSS alone is useless.