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What would it take to get people to abandon the whole thing? CSS has never delivered on any of its promises, yet somehow people still defend it.

by lmm 1y ago

tyleo 1y ago
I disagree. CSS can do a lot. I find myself yearning for it when working in non-web UI frameworks.
duskwuff 1y ago
What would "abandoning" CSS even mean? Going back to table layouts? (Oh good lord no.) Anyways, CSS is fine. The problem space is complicated.
- lmm 1y ago
  > Going back to table layouts? Nested tables and inline styling yeah. It works better. It's always worked better, unless you're handwriting your HTML, and virtually no-one does that anymore.
  - baggy_trough 1y ago
    I for one don't miss the one pixel spacer gif.
  - decremental 1y ago
    [dead]
  - maxbond 1y ago
    You should check out Flexbox and Grid. They're fantastic and aren't as brittle as table layouts (eg you can reflow things on mobile rather than having a big horizontal scroll bar). There is some complexity but the dev tools help a lot. https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/ https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/ https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/ https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/ As an aside, hand-rolling HTML templates is still pretty common (such as for SSG themes), which is substantially similar to hand-rolling HTML. You just get `if` and `for` and a couple other primitives.
  - rjh29 1y ago
    So simple. Want a fancy border? Just make 9 images in photoshop and put them into a 3x3 table with your text inside. Those were the days...
fijiaarone 1y ago
Tailwind is the solution to CSS
- geuis 1y ago
  Tailwind is a hot bloat of a mess. Adds tons of crap to html elements. It's mostly popular among frontend folks who haven't taken the time to actually learn css. I still remember the star selector pattern to prevent IE6 from reading malformed css. So me old. But having grown up in my early career during the transition from embedding styles into html to sites like css zen garden, I am extremely critical of modern "frameworks". I still see so much bloat in poor performing pages and often when I dig deeper it's tailwind in addition to other inefficiencies adding repeated cruft that doesn't help with site rendering. A proper 20 year old understanding of css class style inheritance isn't hard, and it negates 80-90% of the complexity of maintaining complex web apps (react components mainly). CSS grids are cute and useful, but for a hell of a lot of web interfaces a simple float and clear:left still works wonders.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  so you've decided to use Tailwind, now you have two problems: you don't know CSS and you're using Tailwind.
easyThrowaway 1y ago
> What would it take to get people to abandon the whole thing? A new styling language, with better syntax, written taking into account real-world scenarios, widely deployed across all browsers (or at least cross-compiling into CSS)? I wouldn't hold my breath.

What would it take to get people to abandon the whole thing? CSS has never delivered on any of its promises, yet somehow people still defend it.

by lmm 1y ago

What would it take to get people to abandon the whole thing? CSS has never delivered on any of its promises, yet somehow people still defend it.

tyleo 1y ago

I disagree. CSS can do a lot. I find myself yearning for it when working in non-web UI frameworks.

duskwuff 1y ago

What would "abandoning" CSS even mean? Going back to table layouts? (Oh good lord no.) Anyways, CSS is fine. The problem space is complicated.

lmm 1y ago
> Going back to table layouts? Nested tables and inline styling yeah. It works better. It's always worked better, unless you're handwriting your HTML, and virtually no-one does that anymore.
- baggy_trough 1y ago
  I for one don't miss the one pixel spacer gif.
- decremental 1y ago
  [dead]
- maxbond 1y ago
  You should check out Flexbox and Grid. They're fantastic and aren't as brittle as table layouts (eg you can reflow things on mobile rather than having a big horizontal scroll bar). There is some complexity but the dev tools help a lot. https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/ https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/ https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/ https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/ As an aside, hand-rolling HTML templates is still pretty common (such as for SSG themes), which is substantially similar to hand-rolling HTML. You just get `if` and `for` and a couple other primitives.
- rjh29 1y ago
  So simple. Want a fancy border? Just make 9 images in photoshop and put them into a 3x3 table with your text inside. Those were the days...

fijiaarone 1y ago

Tailwind is the solution to CSS

geuis 1y ago
Tailwind is a hot bloat of a mess. Adds tons of crap to html elements. It's mostly popular among frontend folks who haven't taken the time to actually learn css. I still remember the star selector pattern to prevent IE6 from reading malformed css. So me old. But having grown up in my early career during the transition from embedding styles into html to sites like css zen garden, I am extremely critical of modern "frameworks". I still see so much bloat in poor performing pages and often when I dig deeper it's tailwind in addition to other inefficiencies adding repeated cruft that doesn't help with site rendering. A proper 20 year old understanding of css class style inheritance isn't hard, and it negates 80-90% of the complexity of maintaining complex web apps (react components mainly). CSS grids are cute and useful, but for a hell of a lot of web interfaces a simple float and clear:left still works wonders.
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
so you've decided to use Tailwind, now you have two problems: you don't know CSS and you're using Tailwind.

easyThrowaway 1y ago

> What would it take to get people to abandon the whole thing? A new styling language, with better syntax, written taking into account real-world scenarios, widely deployed across all browsers (or at least cross-compiling into CSS)? I wouldn't hold my breath.