You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

Tell that to a decent number of people I have worked with over the past 20 years. In fact, I know people to this day who have been writing CSS for decades who don't really know fundamental things like specificity, inheritance, or the cascade. Pattern matching into the sunset, not a single fundamental piece of CSS specifications ever internalized, still getting paid (its okay).

https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/specs.en.html

You can read this and know most things about CSS. For a bit anyway. You'll forget things you don't use. You might remember them again one day.

[bigbuppo]

I tried to use a framework on a web project recently, but looking at the two most popular frameworks... one of the results in every site looking the same, while the other is a step backwards to the bad old days in the worst possible ways. It was simpler to start from scratch, and I finally understood the cascade. I was actually able to drop most of the explicit class attributes, which led to a significant reduction in page size.

The primary purpose of frameworks was to work around the quirks in all the different web browsers out there, and to implement grid-like layouts before we had css grid, and to deal with the impossibility of centering a div natively. None of that is necessary these days, and hasn't been for a decade.

[_benton]

One reason I think Tailwind became so popular is that it makes it much easier to pattern match CSS. I don't think it's a good or bad thing, it's just a thing.

[danielvaughn]

Can you explain what you mean by pattern matching? I’m not sure I understand.

[tombert]

I never got very good with CSS or HTML styling. I know enough to generally fix obvious stuff, but I'm kind of a luddite and still use Bootstrap for most of my stuff. I've mostly stopped doing web stuff, so the only time I touch CSS is when I'm doing an admin screen or something, so it doesn't have to look great.

Still, a part of me wonders how different my life would be if I had taken to frontend programming enough to make things that look nice. It's not like there isn't anything enjoyable about it, I just ended up taking to backend distributed systems work a bit sooner.

[kyleyeats]

The predecessor to this project was a Bootstrap 3 theme: https://rriepe.github.io/1pxdeep/

The book has a lot of content over what to make pretty and what not to make pretty. I think knowing what not to bother with is an underrated skill. A lot of what inspired me to write it was backenders handing off markup that they tried to make semi-passable. Unstyled HTML, please!

[hinkley]

I did for a while when CSS3 was new.

Big problem with evergreen standards: if you try to come back to a standard that is now twice as big but still has the same version number, there is nobody writing books to teach you what you missed out on. Want to come from CSS2 to 3? They got you. Want to do backend development for five years and then get a summary on what you missed? Go fuck yourself.

[boyter]

I detest writing CSS and HTML. I just find it boring fiddly and annoying. I have started doing "vibe" coding with LLM's. Giving a decent prompt produces results that are... pretty good.

Almost 100% in lighthouse for both mobile and desktop, responsive, reusable components, dark/light mode and a design that was better than I could do in the 2-3 hours I spent doing it (while sipping wine).

I know its not a solution for everyone, and probably won't work for the prettier designs out there, but you can go a long way with these tools this day.

I know there is a reluctance to not use LLM's for code tasks, and I am one of the largest critics, but for me this solves a real pain point. I don't want to write CSS/HTML anymore and these tools do a good enough job of it that I don't have to.

[colonCapitalDee]

LLMs are great for building frontends for backend projects and backends for frontend projects

[kyleyeats]

I agree. CASS (the library this book was promoting) is actually really great paired with LLMs. If I revisit this project, it'll be along the lines of using it with LLMs.

[nativeit]

HN Confessional: I wrote a custom theme for my server management software a few years ago that's basically just a rewrite of the stock theme's rather large CSS file. Among a little more than 1200 lines, I include `!important` 175 times. I imagine that causes hives among our more discerning front-end devs.

[nativeit]

It looks great, specifically for me. I can't comment on anyone else, but I have to imagine it's dysfunctional. I abstracted as many color and style options as possible to allow for a lot of variable-setting. I unreservedly apologize for the affront to common decency (but I'm probably still gonna use it). Gotta have that transparent glass effect on ma' netstats.

[bigbuppo]

And the fix is another framework, because of course it's another framework. Frameworks are to CSS what greige paint is to a house. Trying to implement the missing 5% of a CSS framework without knowing how to implement "complex" CSS from the ground up means you are never implementing the missing 5%. Your site or app or whatever is just going to look like every other site that uses that framework.

Now that CSS is more or less feature complete and the fact that there's just one web browser means you don't need the clever tricks rolled up in a framework to center a div or to have a grid layout that works without resorting to tables. It's literally part of the CSS spec and has been implemented in every browser for a decade now.

[kyleyeats]

The argument I make in the book is that the last 5% of CSS/design should be written by people who can write CSS. Nobody else should even be writing CSS because it turns into a huge mess when everyone jumps in.

I mothballed this project because people were so incredibly cruel about it (a CSS project!). Remember that people who work on this stuff are people, and we're just trying to make things better. Also, you can pry .vertical-center from my cold, dead hands.

[haburka]

> The last big driver of time-wasting in CSS is the drive for pixel perfection

I agree. Also users/product managers do not care. They will see UI that is a little bit “off” and think negatively about your brand. Congrats, now you have a ticket to make the UI look pixel perfect.

I suppose the audience for this isn’t people who actually get paid to write CSS, but instead casual blog writers. It’s definitely ok and normal to have little blips on your side project.

[kyleyeats]

The perfection should be downstream of the project's coded standards, not downstream of the faithful implementation of the designer's work. Some designers are really good about maintaining standards-- but the book would argue all that effort should be spent elsewhere.

It's basically "the arbitrary padding the designer liked in the moment" vs. "the standard padding that's everywhere in the project." This book argues you should always use the standard padding. Your product should be pixel-perfect, just not in the PSD-to-HTML sense.

[ozim]

Not even pixel perfection but also coming up with UX ideas by people who don’t understand technical details.

Like QA not passing some detail because they think it should be different. Where in reality it is what it is because of framework etc.

Yes you mostly can do everything - but not everything is worth spending time/money on.

[goatlover]

It's amazing how much the initial intent of the web has been perverted. Not all for the worse, but still.

[jasonthorsness]

On the other hand, personal sites and side-projects are where you can afford to take as much time as you want in order to achieve pixel perfection without the pressure of shipping anything.

[sampton]

I recently started a green field project using copilot and tailwind. I’m blown away by how good ai is with css. I’m just glad no one has to try wrestle with css like we did back in the days.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I wrote a similar comment yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43316939.

CSS styling used to take me forever, now I basically just tell AI the contours of what I want, and it gives me the vast majority of what I want. It often has some bugs, and I always need to edit/tweak it to get things right, but it probably saves me 90% of the time I used to waste on CSS (I'm primarily a backend dev).

[kyleyeats]

It's true. Between atomic CSS libraries and LLMs, there's almost no reason to write CSS nowadays.

[gnabgib]

(2022)

You've turned your/rriepe's substack series (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yousuckatcss.substack...) into a book? Or actually maybe it's the other way around (based on rriepe's profile[0])

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rriepe

[kyleyeats]

Edited the year into the title. CASS (the CSS library) and YSAC (this book) have been a huge marketing mess, to be honest. And yeah the substack was part of it-- I think the book came first though. Kyle Yeats (rhymes with stylesheets) was going to be a Youtube persona but I could never really get the feel of it right.

The book morphed into being more about project management. I think there's a lot of value in it still, in that respect, so I'm putting it all online for free.

[froginspector]

I am not convinced anyone is truly good at CSS unless its their only job

[appleorchard46]

I enjoy working with CSS immensely. It takes some thought to get things right from the beginning, but I find it's always clear what can be done to improve it.

With modern features like CSS nesting, anyway; just a few years ago when IE support and whatnot was more relevant it was a different story. Now you can just throw everything into a flexbox.

[CottonMcKnight]

CSS is a language, but it is 0.1% syntax and 99.9% memorizing the standard library, which expands monthly.

[pupppet]

The worst part of CSS is trying to come up with the class names.

.every-stupid-ass__naming-scheme-falls-short{}

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

Why? Just ask an LLM if your taxonomy skills are weak. They'll transfer eventually.

Things like BEM give you the most flexibility for extension, things like atomic CSS (tailwind) give you the most velocity for not giving a fuck about ever touching the markup again.

[skipps]

The CASS site on iOS WebKit has bullets overflowing into the border and a mix of fonts that doesn’t look great:

https://casscss.github.io/cass/

[kyleyeats]

Thanks! Lists were the bane of my existence with this project. I could never make all the browsers happy.

This is a #wontfix (sorry), but I might fork it into a new, LLM-oriented CSS project. Fonts and lists will be the first things I look at.

[kayodelycaon]

There’s a reason everything I’ve done in the last 5 years uses bootstrap. And doesn’t have to look like bootstrap. Our internal graphic designer loathes bootstrap and didn’t recognize I had used it until I told them.

[kazinator]

Just try not to be better at CSS than the latest version of any major browser.

[firefoxd]

Hot take: you suck at CSS because you never bothered learning it.

A long time ago, everyone in my team kept making excuses why they hate css. I went to Lynda.com and found a pretty good class. I can't remember the instructor, but it was so good that I still use the same patterns more than a decade later. I tried to get the whole team to take it, but no one wanted to. "It's a waste of time", "It's not even a programming language."

They built all kinds of tooling around css, trying to avoid css. We had dormant css that no one could ever figure out if it was used, we had important and position absolute everywhere. Today, it's not so different. You see divs with 20 or 30 classes in them.

Just learn css. Any class is better than no class.

[thiht]

There are a few basic skills that lots of developers stubbornly refuse to learn properly:

- Regex

- SQL (if you do some backend work)

- CSS (if you do some frontend work)

- Bash + basic CLI tools (vim, grep, find, sed, awk)

- Git

Really learning these makes your life sooo much easier.

[what]

> you see divs with 20 or 30 classes in them

Isn’t that exactly how you’re supposed to use tailwind?

[sunami-ai]

My view is that those who designed CSS suck when it comes to designing intuitive systems.

I would not advocate constraint solvers, in the future I hope ViTs are so cheap to run that they can infer the right layout of things at any orientation and size in single digit milliseconds, solving the layout problem for good =)

[CharlieDigital]

I don't know if I've got it wrong in my head, but at some point it occurred to me that CSS is basically SQL for DOM.

The reason CSS is hard is the same reason that SQL is hard for some.

But I like SQL so I kinda like CSS.

[robocat]

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