EDIT: Thinking about it - maybe the author should have employed a front-end developer? There's a good reason people specifically work on this stuff ..
I don't get this at all. Central to the design of HTML and the Web is the notion of democratic access to information and the ability for non-specialists to create it. Furthermore, the motivation behind CSS was to make it easier to do this work by separating the design from the information. CSS should therefore be, if not intuitive, at least easy to learn, use, and troubleshoot.
It's true, we need brain surgeons to do brain surgery, but we shouldn't need specialists to do basic things like vertical centering, convincing layout without tables, and overriding styles in nested elements.
We've come a long way from the intent of CSS if we're arguing that only specialists should use it.
I imagine the large majority of the hackernews readership can be defined as a 'web specialist' of one kind or another, so if this were true most of us would be out of a job :P
My point is - there's no good reason why front-end development should be any less complicated than back-end development. Just because people expect it to be easy, isn't a good enough reason ..
It's important to distinguish whether a task is made complex because it actually is conceptually complex or because bad syntax and language rules make it complex. In the case of CSS, it tends to be the latter.
Adobe Flex makes application layout dead simple. All you need are horizontal and vertical flows, consistent alignment, and border constraints. CSS would become about 5x more intuitive and productive for web app development if it just added these basic features and allowed us to escape its cryptic realm of floats, blocks, and display:inlines.
People assume that CSS should be easy / that they won't need to learn extra skills - and are then annoyed because it doesn't work in the way they assume it should.
Imo, it's a pretty ridiculous situation - how can a person judge something they don't understand?
I do understand CSS. I've created plenty of fairly complex layouts with it. That's what allows me to judge it as inferior to other layout models I've used.
Why shouldn't it work the way people assume? I see very little benefit for this trade-off, except perhaps for the salaries of CSS gurus.
The problems you might want to solve may be simple - but problems that others might want to solve might be more complex. It's not perfect, but CSS actually works reasonably well in a variety of situations.
My main concerns were based around browser inconsistencies, but things are much better in 2011 (compared to 2005).
There's a strong meme that reinforces the idea that 'CSS is rubbish' - but I think it's actually counter-intuitive to spread it. Basically, all we end up with are a lot of grumbling people who believe it's not worth learning - and don't.
Clearly learning CSS is non-negotiable for being a successful web developer. I'm not contesting that fact, I'm lamenting it.
Sometimes it's useful for an element to be placed 'inline', but also share some of the properties that a block-level element has (like width and height) - so 'inline-block' has its place too.
I think part of the problem is, there are no every-day terms that can be used to illustrate a lot of the concepts that CSS makes use of.
If simple terms were chosen, the ability to do a lot of things would be crippled. Only simple things would be possible - and this wouldn't suit everyone.
But I do agree that it would nice if everything made more sense from the get go.
The essential reason that front-end development "should" be easier than back-end development is that back-end development is fundamentally algorithmic in nature and requires languages powerful enough to solve any solvable problem in computer science, while front-end development--and we really mean layout here--solves the limited problem of placement, layering, and coloring, and only requires a commensurate level of syntactic power for its implementation. I guess my point is that the front-end, or at least the layout portion of the front-end that CSS purports to solve, is so obviously so much less complicated than the back-end that you shouldn't have to point that out in order to deflect the accusation that it's just a naive expectation.
I realize it was probably tongue-in-cheek, but if anyone defends the complexity of CSS by equating it to a jobs program for web dorks, they've just ceded the point that CSS is improperly designed and needlessly complex.
You might only use CSS for layout, but that doesn't mean layout defines the full-extent of its functionality.
When creating client-side user-interfaces, CSS is usually used in conjunction with other technologies. Front-end development often makes use of JS, and last time I checked that was a fully fledged programming language ;) CSS can provide a developer with a lot of flexibility - and the fact that you don't understand it is perhaps the main problem.
I think people assume they don't need to actually learn CSS - and get annoyed when they realise their brain wasn't preloaded with the required knowledge :)
Non-specialists don't need to know CSS in order to author information. The basics of HTML can be learnt in an afternoon.