The "most hated" CSS feature: cos() and sin()

[tasty_freeze]

I can't wait for the LLM() function to drop.

  body { LLM(
    "You are an expert web designer, completely fluent in CSS.
    Create styling for this commerce website which is both
    eye-catching yet professional looking, while being engaging.
    Ensure it conforms to accessibility standards."
   ) }

[garbagepatch]

That's already the present. The result is just cached.

[cyphar]

You forgot "Take a deep breath. Don't make mistakes. An old lady will die if you misplace a div."

[m463]

it is unethical to do this without stimulating the economy:

  LLM("You are an expert at coffee shop ordering.
       order a venti iced caramel macchiato,
       half-caf, almond milk, light ice and
       send it to table 9")

[ww520]

That's what a LLM based template engine looks like.

[falcor84]

I actually am really looking forward to a future where we have better tooling for a true "user agent" that knows my preferences and can style every page automatically just ust the way I like it (and letting me override anything by asking it once and having it remember). I'm so tired of UX designers choosing things for me assuming I'm a 5-year old.

[nicbou]

"Can you make it pop more?"

[dgfitz]

hallucinates ‘fluent’ and draws a net to catch eyes

[Sohcahtoa82]

Surprises me when people hate on trigonometry. I enjoyed trig in high school so much that I made it my internet alias.

[Waterluvian]

Did you learn it as “sign on highway, cozy at home, tan on arm”? That’s basically the only high school math that stuck with me.

Oh and I guess negative b plus or minus b squared something something four a c over two a. I think there’s a square root to shove most of that into.

[cratermoon]

I find it conceptually cool, but I struggled in school with learning the identities, memorization being one of my weak areas.

[rmonvfer]

This made my day. Great alias!

[memset]

Some Old Horse Caught Another Horse Taking Oats Away

[untilted]

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/809/

[chris_wot]

You think they hate trigonometry, then you tell them about radians and they really hate trigonometry. Which is... crazy really.

[stevage]

It's a shame that sin and cos get lumped in with all the other trigonometry that you don't need to know, because the two basic formulas are incredibly useful and easy to learn:

x = distance * cos(angle)

y = distance * sin(angle)

Screw the rest. I learnt these as a kid writing a 2D computer game years before coming across them in high school maths.

[ViscountPenguin]

Nah, the rest is pretty great aswell. Lest you go to gamedev hell by saying you dislike atan2

[raldi]

Mods, new title suggestion: "CSS's cos() and sin() features"

[geor9e]

I would wholeheartedly support the mods rewriting every clickbait headline on HN (there are just so many…)

[etbebl]

It's crazy to me that a significant number of people know "cos" and "sin" primarily though CSS. Is that really what this is implying? Or maybe people just find them hard in general, but it seems odd to think of them as features you dislike, rather than attributing the dislike to the underlying math, if you've ever taken a trig class before.

[zamadatix]

I take it as the second assumption, as in people who think "CSS has already gotten too complex, now this complicated trig shit is part of it too?".

Keep in mind it's only 9.1%, or 1 in 11, that actually had a "negative opinion" of it. This makes the phrasing/focus on "hated" seem a bit forced.

[recursive]

This seems like the type of thing that I'd want to like. But the necessity of inline assigning the `--i` CSS variables to each element bothers me. I have to use some template system or manually keep these variables in sync in my markup. Doing those things seems worse than doing this kind of layout arithmetic in javascript, loathe though I am to admit it.

[Theodores]

Agreed.

I just checked with some code that I wrote a while back to rotate a faux-3D pyramid, to see how I did it. The trigonometry was the easy part, it was the backface culling that was the hard part. Anyway, I decorated my elements with CSS variables in script and used lots of Math.sin/cos/tan. Also present were lots of radian conversion things and the fun that goes with animating things the 'right way'. Basically oodles of extra stuff that took me the best part of a week to do, to result in something that memory leaks if left running for a few hours.

Now I have seen this article, I might just have to mix and match JS and CSS, so I build out the elements in code and add the CSS variables to them, for everything else to be done in CSS. I will obviously need an intersection observer to trigger the CSS rather than my JS, and so it goes on!

Either way, the trigonometry is the easy part, fixing that memory leak the hard part, but CSS is the way to go because that will work perfectly, unlike with JS.

[mhink]

He does mention at one point that sometime soon it won't be necessary:

> Note: This step will become much easier and concise when the sibling-index() and sibling-count() functions gain support (and they’re really neat). I’m hardcoding the indexes with inline CSS variables in the meantime.

The inline links there go to https://css-tricks.com/almanac/functions/s/sibling-index/, which is pretty nifty honestly.

[zamadatix]

Inlining isn't necessarily a requirement for how it's used here. E.g. you could put something like:

  .container:nth-child(1) {--i: 1}
  .container:nth-child(2) {--i: 2}
  ...

In your CSS. Still not all that ideal given you need to ensure you have enough entries for all the entries you might have... but at least a more dynamic and self-contained option until the `sibling-index()` feature they mention roles out.

[regnull]

"What I find funny about cos() and sin()— and also why I think there is confusion around them — is the many ways we can describe them. We don’t have to look too hard. A quick glance at this Wikipedia page has an eye-watering number of super nuanced definitions."

I don't even know how to begin parsing this sentence.

[haskellshill]

That's three sentences, none of which are particularly difficult to parse

[chuckadams]

I would have thought the most-hated feature would be the `float` property. I guess alternatives have been around long enough that people just ignore it rather than nurture an eternal smouldering hatred for it.

[thoughtpalette]

Personally have not seen a float used in the wild since flex-box gained traction. And a simple .clear-float utility class usually addressed the most common float issue.

[LinAGKar]

So why do people hate CSS's trigonometry implementation?

[lifthrasiir]

CSS trig functions, combined with mod() and friends, effectively enable seeded random noise functions as they did in shaders. Interesting times.

[bawolff]

They are also planning to add random() although no browsers support it yet.

filter also had some randomness support (via svg <feTurbulance>

[alekratz]

When I loaded up the page, something like 5 empty HTML files downloaded automatically, did this happen to anyone else? Firefox Linux

[F3nd0]

No such incident here. Firefox on GNU. Also using uBlock Origin, though.

[swyx]

oh wow first css tricks i've seen post acquisition

what's up with the magazine in general... is it doing ok?

[spartanatreyu]

Post-acquisition the Digital Ocean ran it for a little while with the same staff, then they let a whole bunch of people go (both digital ocean and css-tricks staff).

The css-tricks website was basically dormant for a few years.

Chris (the original creator of css-tricks) sick of seeing his creation stagnate tried to get Digital Ocean to get the website going again but it looked like Digital Ocean didn't know enough about the site to resume posting.

At some point the website's editor (Geoff) who had been let go as part of the layoff came back to work on the website and their was much rejoicing.

---

You can read more about it here: https://chriscoyier.net/2024/02/28/where-im-at-on-the-whole-...

---

CSS-trick's content had a bit rocky at the start of its comeback, but it's feels much better now than it did when it first resumed.

The vibe is a little bit different now, but I think that's because so many webdev writers are experimenting and writing in the open on mastodon before posting on their own blogs and larger platforms like css-tricks.

We didn't get as much of a peak behind the curtain before.

[egypturnash]

brb gonna see how much of DOC’s Demons Are Forever can be collapsed into simple css animations (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3tSI8gw_yUQ)

[drivingmenuts]

Is it just me or did none of the examples show up in Codepen? The code was there, but nothing showed in the display.

[zamadatix]

Hmm, worked for me on macOS, Linux, and Windows across Chrome/Firefox/Safari.

[muzani]

It didn't work for me the first time I opened it, but did after the second.