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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.
  - marksbrown 3y ago
    Microsoft failed to capture the internet. IE6 can still cause sane minds to crack.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bazoom42 3y ago
  > The MOST BASIC NOTION of layout, putting things in a freaking grid, was missing from CSS for almost two decades This is not true. CSS have had ‘display:table’ for 25 years, which is a simple grid layout model equivalent to html tables. Content can be aligned in rows and columns. ‘Display:grid’ is much more powerful of course.
  - crispyambulance 3y ago
    Yeah, I remember those. It was intended as a way to make "tables" using divs. That way, we could pretend to do page layout with CSS, while still feeling shitty about repurposing something meant for tables. There's just no justifiable reason for putting whole-page lay-out on the back-burner for so long. So many other far less important things came out before grid, it feels almost like it was deliberately spiteful to delay it so long.
    - bazoom42 3y ago
      Why would you feel shitty about using ‘display:table’? It puts things into a freaking grid as you asked for.
      - jampekka 3y ago
        There was a huge cargo cult adamantly against using tables back in the day, even though the "true way" of hacking divs with float and clearfixes and invisible images was totally broken. Somehow having bunch of wrapper and empty divs was "more semantic" or something. I was in the cult. It was totally inane, but seems to carry some effects to this day.
        bazoom42 3y ago
        The movement was against using html table markup (<table>, <tr> etc.) for layout because of the accessibility issues. It was not against the CSS display:table since that does not affect accessibility.

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.
- marksbrown 3y ago
  Microsoft failed to capture the internet. IE6 can still cause sane minds to crack.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bazoom42 3y ago
> The MOST BASIC NOTION of layout, putting things in a freaking grid, was missing from CSS for almost two decades This is not true. CSS have had ‘display:table’ for 25 years, which is a simple grid layout model equivalent to html tables. Content can be aligned in rows and columns. ‘Display:grid’ is much more powerful of course.
- crispyambulance 3y ago
  Yeah, I remember those. It was intended as a way to make "tables" using divs. That way, we could pretend to do page layout with CSS, while still feeling shitty about repurposing something meant for tables. There's just no justifiable reason for putting whole-page lay-out on the back-burner for so long. So many other far less important things came out before grid, it feels almost like it was deliberately spiteful to delay it so long.
  - bazoom42 3y ago
    Why would you feel shitty about using ‘display:table’? It puts things into a freaking grid as you asked for.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      There was a huge cargo cult adamantly against using tables back in the day, even though the "true way" of hacking divs with float and clearfixes and invisible images was totally broken. Somehow having bunch of wrapper and empty divs was "more semantic" or something. I was in the cult. It was totally inane, but seems to carry some effects to this day.
      - bazoom42 3y ago
        The movement was against using html table markup (<table>, <tr> etc.) for layout because of the accessibility issues. It was not against the CSS display:table since that does not affect accessibility.