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Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

I 100% agree with your opinion on “utility-first CSS”.

I wouldn’t declare CSS dead though. Some folks, like myself, continue to do things the right (IMHO) way. I sometimes even consider creating a new site like CSS Zen Garden (haven’t bothered to check whether such already exists)... imagine the creations people could make nowadays.

I also use Bootstrap, and I love it, but I don’t use it to design my apps / websites; I use it for its utilities (responsive utilities, form styles, etc.). I realize there are smaller frameworks for this purpose, and I sometimes use them also. I still design most of the internal layout from scratch (e.g., I don’t use “cards” and other shortcuts to bypass meaningful design, etc.).

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Maybe I just have an unusual learning style, or haven't gotten the right resources, but I've found traditional, semantic CSS to have a brutal learning curve. When you're trying to build complex apps, you're constantly rearranging your taxonomy of classes to break down the page into an appropriate logical hierarchy. I appreciate that in principle this is a good thing to do, and once you get good at it there is less rewriting, but when you're trying to learn all of the other aspects of this craft at the same time, it can be a draining experience.

And I mean this on the scale of years, not just the 6-12 month "just getting the basics" stage of learning to be a dev.

If we still had the position of "front end developer" in the old sense of writing HTML, CSS, and maybe some light JS, that's someone who could dedicate their resources to mastering semantic CSS. Sometimes I wish there was still a job like that, but for whatever historical reasons, at most companies what we have is a combined role called "front end developer" that involves fairly heavy duty development with client side frameworks like React, but also all of the HTML and CSS stuff. And asking these folks to get good at the semantic side of CSS at the same time as learning all the rest, is asking a lot. Maybe worth it, but it's no joke.

I should have mentioned that I don’t apply the semantic concepts completely and dogmatically. They just act as a guiding philosophy.

I definitely have to agree that the complexity of “front end development”, as a role, has increased drastically, meaning there is much less time to dedicate to learning and applying these types of traditionalist techniques, compared to pragmatically and quickly implementing things with heavy framework usage.

I also think there is a bit of a vicious circle with that mindset. When people use frameworks they tend to build more complicated things than they might without those frameworks, which makes plain ol’ CSS/ JS look like an untenable solution. When I think of building an app with plain CSS and JS with only jQuery, I think of it as a helpful constraint that will lead to simpler code and simpler functionality, not to mention what could be megabytes less of tools and frameworks that users will need to load.

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