Me. I'm a backend developer who occasionally wants to make a web frontend for a side-project but knows essentially no CSS. The solutions are not "well understood" by me because I know no CSS.
In that case I'd say the problem is exactly what you state
> knows essentially no CSS
The solution is quite obvious then too: learn some. It's not hard. Understanding the basics is a afternoon job. Diving a bit deeper a day, and learning about some often-used more in depth features like "responsive" or flexbox, another day. For a software developer/engineer that builds backends, CSS really isn't that hard.
That's not to say a basic CSS set and some explanation like in TLA, isn't useful.
It's my pet-peeve that in software development, I'm convinced we should understand the stuff that we work with. Not all, and certainly not everything in great detail, but enough to know where to find the info and details when working with it. From sysadmin to the concepts of cryptography and from accessibility to how an OS writes stuff to disk. Even if that means constantly learning.
> The solution is quite obvious then too: learn some.
That’s the whole point of this article. CSS is a huge language. Where do you even begin? This article is a perfect response to that very natural question.
It really isn't a huge language. It's not even a language. There are some basic principles, but it's pretty much a bunch of pick-and-choose attributes for HTML that you can wrap up into "classes". I've worked heavily with it for 25 years and I still basically just screw around until something looks good.
There is no point to this article. This is the most common kind of trash you can find if you type in "minimum css"... it's not even that. Come on. Have integrity in your work and learn how to do it.
It's a declarative language, not an imperative/functional language. You describe the desired end result, the browser figures out how to lay things out to fit all the constraints.
And this:
> but it's pretty much a bunch of pick-and-choose attributes for HTML that you can wrap up into "classes".
indicates despite using it for 25 years, you haven't even tried to learn it. This may have been partially true back when it was first introduced and all people knew were things like "font" and "[text-]align", but it's been a horribly inaccurate description of CSS for decades now.
C'mon. I'm a full stack dev but this is like me saying I just want to code something quick in C++ but don't know anything about it. Maybe I don't know how to tell a pointer from a shared_ptr or what a destructor is. Even if I don't know how to do them, I'm pretty aware that these things are very well understood and documented by a huge community, to the point that I probably wouldn't rely on some AI-written article with almost no useful information to show me how to do what I wanted to do... I'd want to actually learn what was going on under the hood... and if I did somehow find such an article useful to explaining pointers in the most vapid way possible for my use case, I certainly wouldn't post it to HN. And if I did post it to HN and it suddenly ranked to the top, I would think something had gone completely wrong with the universe.
It's an objectively terrible article. It gives a bunch of arbitrary things to copy without really explaining them, and it is completely useless for building anything real. It is probably written by an AI. It's trash. What on earth makes you think it deserves more attention than the other million useless articles on this subject?
