5 ms·

And with this convenient domain excuse, CSS has managed to become a system that’s not a fit for any domain. It’s incomprehensible to visual designers, incompre

by pavlov 3y ago

And with this convenient domain excuse, CSS has managed to become a system that’s not a fit for any domain. It’s incomprehensible to visual designers, incomprehensible to programmers, and incomprehensible to document authors. On the upside, it provides a massive moat of sunk cost and implicit implementation dependency around Chromium, so at least there’s that.

afavour 3y ago
I’m a web programmer and I find it comprehensible. Sure there are times I need to go to the docs but vast majority of the time I can work with it just fine. I’d agree that it probably is incomprehensible to many visual designers but unfortunately so is code in general. CSS is complex, especially these days, but I feel like those who don’t work with the web every day simply don’t get to experience it often enough to know that it does make sense within its domain. But sure, if you want, CSS is a conspiracy theory to ensure the dominance of Google.
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  Of course it is, there is even the word "masonry" in TFA's name!
- pavlov 3y ago
  It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a well-intentioned but poorly thought-out design for basic 1990s word processing layouts that accidentally blew up to describe entire application GUIs, and now it’s not in the interest of the stakeholders to try to do anything about it. It’s the same kind of growth pattern as government bureaucracies. Those are largely not conspiracies either, despite the occasional optics.
  - afavour 3y ago
    What you’re describing is the organic growth of a platform. The web is undeniably more complex than it was twenty years ago but needs are more complex too. Yes, the complexity does benefit major players but that isn’t the reason the complexity exists. It’s ironic you’re saying that CSS is some form of vendor lock in. I have to imagine that if Google proposed a new layout engine for the web tomorrow they’d be roasted to kingdom come for their attempt at taking over the web.
miunau 3y ago
Maybe you need better glasses. This proposal is coming from the Webkit team, ie. Apple. CSS is plenty comprehensible and using it gets better with every browser release as they are focused around yearly interoperability efforts.
- jampekka 3y ago
  I happen to quite like CSS (in comparison to any other layouting system out there), but I really wouldn't characterize it plenty comprehensible. I'm quite certain there's no human on earth that could reliably predict the outcome of most non-trivial real-life CSS layouts given just the code. And even though the situation has improved a lot, it's still common to have to use clearfixque hacks that definitely weren't envisioned by the commitees.
  - echoangle 3y ago
    Isn’t that true for most software? Do you think you can simulate the outcome of a semi complicated Python Codebase just by looking at it? That’s just an intrinsic property of the problem you’re dealing with, adaptive page layout will always be complicated and not easily understandable just by looking at code.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      I think I'd have a lot better shot with a semi-complicated Python codebase to be correct. Even with GUI stuff if using something like e.g. Qt box layouts. Yes, CSS is a lot more powerful than those kinds of systems. Perhaps comparable to constraint satisfaction layouts that tend to be quite surprising. But even so, there are so many settings and their combined behavior in CSS that it's, for me at least, totally infeasible to try to code much CSS "up-front" without constantly checking the result of the changes. And I don't mind it that much, but I'm quite certain that a more "predictable" equally powerful layouting system is entirely possible. It could be an interesting challenge to show people some layouts and ask them to produce them using CSS without being able to iterate the results.
- pavlov 3y ago
FartinMowler 3y ago
What would you propose instead that is comprehensible to visual designers, programmers, and document authors?
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  The inane and utterly incomprehensible toolset that they happen to be more familiar with, obviously. Some people take their ball and go home after they can’t work out how to centre a div, after decades of having “HTML and CSS are for the ‘stupid’ developers” drilled into them, and thinking that they can intuit it.
yau8edq12i 3y ago
And yet, somehow, I browse websites using CSS successfully every day. Reality disagrees with your narrative, which is nothing more than a pandering "CSS bad" with little substance. "Not fit for any domain", "incomprehensible", these insults are based on what, exactly?
camillomiller 3y ago
It’s always funny to read people that just never understood CSS trying to convince everyone that CSS is impossible to understand!
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  it's better on HN because you can get it combined with snide insinuations that they could have created a better layout system that would do all the things that CSS does, but also fix the various problems that CSS has. However the glory days are evidently behind us, because these insinuations never end with "in a weekend" anymore.
- jampekka 3y ago
  I'd be surprised to hear anybody with intimate knowledge of CSS claiming to understand CSS.
- crispyambulance 3y ago
  Yes, that's fair. Sure, today we have grid and vanilla CSS is sane and useable by anyone who takes the time to learn the modern way of doing things. But let's not forget what a long and tortured road CSS has taken to become what it is today. CSS was a total dumpster fire up until around when flexbox came out. It was SO HARD to make it do what you want for SO LONG. The MOST BASIC NOTION of layout, putting things in a freaking grid, was missing from CSS for almost two decades. Yet, the grid concept has been around in application layout since the 1980's. I can't explain why it took CSS such a long time, and the explanations I've heard don't seem plausible to me. It's understandable that folks who were around in the bad days of CSS are still kind of bitter. I was, and if I didn't take the time to see the new ways of using it, I would still be incredulous about CSS.
  - afavour 3y ago
    > I can't explain why it took CSS such a long time It is weird to look back on but the web platform essentially went through a dark ages for a while. You could say the same about why it took us so long to get to ES6 JS, too. The standards bodies were frozen in ice (and I don’t quite know why either), everyone was debating HTML5 vs XHTML and somehow the rest of the platform floundered for years.
greasyphalanges 3y ago
I will concede to an argument that CSS exemplifies "design by committee" pejorative and is blighted by backward compatibility woes, but rest assured, it does its job as best as it can. Web development has patchworked its way out of most problems it has created, making it somewhat burdensome to learn. I'd say that is its Achilles's heel.
dada78641 3y ago
While I agree that CSS is sometimes difficult and obtuse, and getting things working in it is more of an art than a science, it's actually shockingly easy to get basic layouts working in it these days even as a total beginner. CSS is very powerful and you can learn the basics very quickly. It's also worth keeping in mind that CSS is sometimes more complicated than it seems like it should be due to accessibility concerns and flexibility. That's why you can take some HTML produced by some part of your system and use it in completely different contexts with totally different designs, entirely as is, just by adding a few different rules. I've been doing HTML dev since the late 90s and things were infinitely more difficult back in the old days. CSS might have been simpler, but doing complex things required tons of bizarre hacks that also made your design more frail and less accessible. These days CSS has improved to the point where you can do just about anything, and even very complicated effects can fairly easily be deconstructed just by looking at the devtools and poking around until you get it. CSS isn't perfect, but all things considered I'm not complaining.
snapcaster 3y ago
Not fit for any domain? It's one of the most widely used "programming languages" in the world. It's clearly fit for many domains I don't know why people have to be so dramatic with their tech opinions
- bodantogat 3y ago
  I don't get the drama either. The issue I have with CSS is less about the spec itself, and more about browser compatibility. I'd be dead with caniuse.com and MDN. Having said that, when I build a new page, I rarely need to spend more time laying out the html & css than it takes to type it out and test. Creating cross platform, responsive web pages is a solved problem now.
gherkinnn 3y ago
Nonsense. CSS works. It has its quirks, but what doesn't? What I do see here, is one of many cases of "I don't understand it therefore it is dumb because it can't be my fault".
bmacho 3y ago
But your favorite 20% of CSS (just like in the old days + some of the new features) fits nicely for web design.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
It's honestly not that difficult at all, saying that as a designer.
JamesSwift 3y ago
HTML and CSS were created in a time where the entire point was to provide marked-up documents to be read. Now the browser is mainly a generic application runtime. Its like if the terminal was actually now mostly a video player and people complaining about how awk and sed are tough to use against video frames.

by pavlov 3y ago

afavour 3y ago

I’m a web programmer and I find it comprehensible. Sure there are times I need to go to the docs but vast majority of the time I can work with it just fine. I’d agree that it probably is incomprehensible to many visual designers but unfortunately so is code in general. CSS is complex, especially these days, but I feel like those who don’t work with the web every day simply don’t get to experience it often enough to know that it does make sense within its domain. But sure, if you want, CSS is a conspiracy theory to ensure the dominance of Google.

Joker_vD 3y ago
Of course it is, there is even the word "masonry" in TFA's name!
pavlov 3y ago
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a well-intentioned but poorly thought-out design for basic 1990s word processing layouts that accidentally blew up to describe entire application GUIs, and now it’s not in the interest of the stakeholders to try to do anything about it. It’s the same kind of growth pattern as government bureaucracies. Those are largely not conspiracies either, despite the occasional optics.
- afavour 3y ago
  What you’re describing is the organic growth of a platform. The web is undeniably more complex than it was twenty years ago but needs are more complex too. Yes, the complexity does benefit major players but that isn’t the reason the complexity exists. It’s ironic you’re saying that CSS is some form of vendor lock in. I have to imagine that if Google proposed a new layout engine for the web tomorrow they’d be roasted to kingdom come for their attempt at taking over the web.

miunau 3y ago

Maybe you need better glasses. This proposal is coming from the Webkit team, ie. Apple. CSS is plenty comprehensible and using it gets better with every browser release as they are focused around yearly interoperability efforts.

jampekka 3y ago
I happen to quite like CSS (in comparison to any other layouting system out there), but I really wouldn't characterize it plenty comprehensible. I'm quite certain there's no human on earth that could reliably predict the outcome of most non-trivial real-life CSS layouts given just the code. And even though the situation has improved a lot, it's still common to have to use clearfixque hacks that definitely weren't envisioned by the commitees.
- echoangle 3y ago
  Isn’t that true for most software? Do you think you can simulate the outcome of a semi complicated Python Codebase just by looking at it? That’s just an intrinsic property of the problem you’re dealing with, adaptive page layout will always be complicated and not easily understandable just by looking at code.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    I think I'd have a lot better shot with a semi-complicated Python codebase to be correct. Even with GUI stuff if using something like e.g. Qt box layouts. Yes, CSS is a lot more powerful than those kinds of systems. Perhaps comparable to constraint satisfaction layouts that tend to be quite surprising. But even so, there are so many settings and their combined behavior in CSS that it's, for me at least, totally infeasible to try to code much CSS "up-front" without constantly checking the result of the changes. And I don't mind it that much, but I'm quite certain that a more "predictable" equally powerful layouting system is entirely possible. It could be an interesting challenge to show people some layouts and ask them to produce them using CSS without being able to iterate the results.
pavlov 3y ago

FartinMowler 3y ago

What would you propose instead that is comprehensible to visual designers, programmers, and document authors?

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
The inane and utterly incomprehensible toolset that they happen to be more familiar with, obviously. Some people take their ball and go home after they can’t work out how to centre a div, after decades of having “HTML and CSS are for the ‘stupid’ developers” drilled into them, and thinking that they can intuit it.

yau8edq12i 3y ago

And yet, somehow, I browse websites using CSS successfully every day. Reality disagrees with your narrative, which is nothing more than a pandering "CSS bad" with little substance. "Not fit for any domain", "incomprehensible", these insults are based on what, exactly?

camillomiller 3y ago

It’s always funny to read people that just never understood CSS trying to convince everyone that CSS is impossible to understand!

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
it's better on HN because you can get it combined with snide insinuations that they could have created a better layout system that would do all the things that CSS does, but also fix the various problems that CSS has. However the glory days are evidently behind us, because these insinuations never end with "in a weekend" anymore.
jampekka 3y ago
I'd be surprised to hear anybody with intimate knowledge of CSS claiming to understand CSS.
crispyambulance 3y ago
Yes, that's fair. Sure, today we have grid and vanilla CSS is sane and useable by anyone who takes the time to learn the modern way of doing things. But let's not forget what a long and tortured road CSS has taken to become what it is today. CSS was a total dumpster fire up until around when flexbox came out. It was SO HARD to make it do what you want for SO LONG. The MOST BASIC NOTION of layout, putting things in a freaking grid, was missing from CSS for almost two decades. Yet, the grid concept has been around in application layout since the 1980's. I can't explain why it took CSS such a long time, and the explanations I've heard don't seem plausible to me. It's understandable that folks who were around in the bad days of CSS are still kind of bitter. I was, and if I didn't take the time to see the new ways of using it, I would still be incredulous about CSS.
- afavour 3y ago
  > I can't explain why it took CSS such a long time It is weird to look back on but the web platform essentially went through a dark ages for a while. You could say the same about why it took us so long to get to ES6 JS, too. The standards bodies were frozen in ice (and I don’t quite know why either), everyone was debating HTML5 vs XHTML and somehow the rest of the platform floundered for years.

greasyphalanges 3y ago

I will concede to an argument that CSS exemplifies "design by committee" pejorative and is blighted by backward compatibility woes, but rest assured, it does its job as best as it can. Web development has patchworked its way out of most problems it has created, making it somewhat burdensome to learn. I'd say that is its Achilles's heel.

dada78641 3y ago

While I agree that CSS is sometimes difficult and obtuse, and getting things working in it is more of an art than a science, it's actually shockingly easy to get basic layouts working in it these days even as a total beginner. CSS is very powerful and you can learn the basics very quickly. It's also worth keeping in mind that CSS is sometimes more complicated than it seems like it should be due to accessibility concerns and flexibility. That's why you can take some HTML produced by some part of your system and use it in completely different contexts with totally different designs, entirely as is, just by adding a few different rules. I've been doing HTML dev since the late 90s and things were infinitely more difficult back in the old days. CSS might have been simpler, but doing complex things required tons of bizarre hacks that also made your design more frail and less accessible. These days CSS has improved to the point where you can do just about anything, and even very complicated effects can fairly easily be deconstructed just by looking at the devtools and poking around until you get it. CSS isn't perfect, but all things considered I'm not complaining.

snapcaster 3y ago

Not fit for any domain? It's one of the most widely used "programming languages" in the world. It's clearly fit for many domains I don't know why people have to be so dramatic with their tech opinions

bodantogat 3y ago
I don't get the drama either. The issue I have with CSS is less about the spec itself, and more about browser compatibility. I'd be dead with caniuse.com and MDN. Having said that, when I build a new page, I rarely need to spend more time laying out the html & css than it takes to type it out and test. Creating cross platform, responsive web pages is a solved problem now.

gherkinnn 3y ago

Nonsense. CSS works. It has its quirks, but what doesn't? What I do see here, is one of many cases of "I don't understand it therefore it is dumb because it can't be my fault".

bmacho 3y ago

But your favorite 20% of CSS (just like in the old days + some of the new features) fits nicely for web design.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

It's honestly not that difficult at all, saying that as a designer.

JamesSwift 3y ago

HTML and CSS were created in a time where the entire point was to provide marked-up documents to be read. Now the browser is mainly a generic application runtime. Its like if the terminal was actually now mostly a video player and people complaining about how awk and sed are tough to use against video frames.