Paywalled. If anyone has access, I’d appreciate a quick summary.
As someone who’s been a web dev for well over 20 years now I still don’t like CSS. I don’t think I’ve ever liked it. I find it inconsistent. There’s so many ways to do the same thing and the documentation for it online is all over the place. It’s also annoying that every few years you essentially have to “re-learn” it as new trends come and go. There was the whole annoying “paralax” era, The bootstrap era, the SVG era, the “actionscript mimic” era, etc, etc, etc. And it’s not like the language has evolved much it’s just that people discover that you can get it to do what it may never have been intended to do. So you have to relearn that. “Don’t use CSS for that it can’t do it, use Javascript” and then later “oh actually CSS CAN do that, we just never bothered to try it so don’t use Javascript.”
I just use tailwind now because it reminds me of building websites in the late 90s on Geocities. I like not having to deal with a stylesheet anymore.
Also slapping a gender on CSS is idiotic and, frankly, an insult to female developers. Is it a bad language? no. it’s a poorly documented one? yes. And it’s annoying that if you don’t use it a certain way, depending on current position of the sun, you’re “doing it wrong”. I can achieve the same look for a site in a metric shit ton of ways with CSS and it’ll look the same, perform the same, everything but heaven forbid someone takes a look at the style sheet and say “you shouldn’t have done it like this” meanwhile 2 years ago, that was the correct way to do it.
And the problem with CSS now is the current “trend” is god damn horrible. JetBrainsMono (the worst font of all time, right up there if not surpassing Comic Sans), rounded purple/dull blue borders for EVERYTHING. It’s horrible. If your goal is to make your site or whatever you’re working on look as amateurish as possible then you’ll use JetBrainsMono.
CSS evolved a lot over the years, not sure how you could argue otherwise. 20 years ago we didn’t have flexbox or grid or variables. Those are all huge for the impact they had on creating responsive layouts. Not to mention things built on top of CSS like CSS modules and LESS.
I also disagree that CSS is poorly documented. There’s great documentation for it on MDN, but much of it won’t make sense unless you invest time in understanding the browser rendering pipeline and how layering works. And you need a pretty deep understanding of to really matter CSS.
Most devs don’t bother because you can get CSS to be “good enough” even if it breaks in some edge cases. But that isn’t very different from other forms of style sheet languages.
Tailwind is garbage people use because they’d rather write fast with spaghetti code than properly make consistent design
Design trends coming and going isn’t really CSS’s fault.
I wonder what we would use if we could start again with all we learned the last 3 decades.
Can we stop with the wired article? Not a lot of quality is coming from them for a long time.
Terrible article. Don’t waste your time.
Real enough language, just a fucking awful one to my first language C brain, I enjoy it as much as forcing Word to format somewhat sensibly (i.e. I never invested the time to get good). I’ll use it the bare minimum to get a job done that it does best. Then again I feel the same way about javascript, but Python is fine. However, if you’re gendering code you’re at best a bloody idiot and probably a misogynistic asshole.
