The entire article itself presents incredibly poor reasoning or no reasoning at all for its points.
It's really hard to appreciate it now because CSS (along with JS+HTML) has been extended and upgraded gradually over the years, but CSS is incredibly good for styling and formatting DOCUMENTS - which have a very specific definition, especially back in the 90's when it was first conceived. This is what is was originally designed for.
In that sense the complaints about CSS are perfectly reasonable: why are we using a document styling language for building arbitrarily sophisticated web applications when it was clearly not originally designed for that? You could say the same with HTML and JS really.
> Quit acting like CSS is some giant-ass mistake that needs fixing. A group of people who were collectively smarter than us wrote those specs. They didn’t make mistakes. Assume you are making the mistake, not them.
So what year again was the CSS standard was first published? Checks google quickly -- oh it was back in...1996. HTML was...1991. And JavaScript in...1995.
Yes, it's well known that people in the 1990's were much smarter than people in the 2020's! It's not like there's been decades of progress since then! CSS is utterly fit for purose and bereft of any flaw or defect! Absolutely nothing new needs to be invented or discovered about front-end web development in 2024! There's no point in trying to improve things!
OK, it's hilarious the author rails against things like SASS, and CSS is now being updated to incorporate many of the same features that SASS introduced:
- Not to mention things like CSS variables, calc() etc.
Usually people whine about the status quo or things staying the same for too long and in response, try to improve things. This article almost seems like a big whinge about how things should stop changing and regress or go back in time? That's not happening. If people had the author's sensibilities or attitude back in the 2000's we'd never move past `float: left` for positioning or tables for multi-columnar layouts. Utterly bizarre.
It's really hard to appreciate it now because CSS (along with JS+HTML) has been extended and upgraded gradually over the years, but CSS is incredibly good for styling and formatting DOCUMENTS - which have a very specific definition, especially back in the 90's when it was first conceived. This is what is was originally designed for.
In that sense the complaints about CSS are perfectly reasonable: why are we using a document styling language for building arbitrarily sophisticated web applications when it was clearly not originally designed for that? You could say the same with HTML and JS really.
> Quit acting like CSS is some giant-ass mistake that needs fixing. A group of people who were collectively smarter than us wrote those specs. They didn’t make mistakes. Assume you are making the mistake, not them.
So what year again was the CSS standard was first published? Checks google quickly -- oh it was back in...1996. HTML was...1991. And JavaScript in...1995.
Yes, it's well known that people in the 1990's were much smarter than people in the 2020's! It's not like there's been decades of progress since then! CSS is utterly fit for purose and bereft of any flaw or defect! Absolutely nothing new needs to be invented or discovered about front-end web development in 2024! There's no point in trying to improve things!
OK, it's hilarious the author rails against things like SASS, and CSS is now being updated to incorporate many of the same features that SASS introduced:
- CSS nesting: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-nesting-1/
- Scoping (no more global): https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/at-scope
- Not to mention things like CSS variables, calc() etc.
Usually people whine about the status quo or things staying the same for too long and in response, try to improve things. This article almost seems like a big whinge about how things should stop changing and regress or go back in time? That's not happening. If people had the author's sensibilities or attitude back in the 2000's we'd never move past `float: left` for positioning or tables for multi-columnar layouts. Utterly bizarre.