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Comment by hmwhy | Hacker News Reader

Based on the way the article is written, I assume that software engineering was not new to the author when he first started writing CSS. It seems strange to me to write an article like this because it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first.

I'm honestly just trying to understand how articles like this get promoted to the front page of Hacker News more and more often. I imagine that writing an article about [insert related field of mathematics] before diving into [insert field of physics] every week would not land me on the front page of Hacker News every week.

Edit: "basic field" -> "related field".

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> it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first

You'd be surprised how many otherwise-competent engineers don't take CSS seriously enough to seek out the fundamentals, and instead spend their days avoiding it as much as possible and cursing it when they can't

There is a stigma amongst "real programmers" against "web developers". So a "real programmer" will never become adept at CSS because it doesn't appeal to their ego

I totally avoid CSS at work because it’s just an insane whack-a-mole spaghetti based upon our own SASS framework written by a few designers that had to learn CSS without any mentoring (since they are in their own « design » team), and don’t understand the consequences of what they do.

So yes, I totally spend my days avoiding it. Not because I hate CSS (I love it in some way, and I miss writing elegant stylesheets) but because CSS is a delicate tool that is hard to be maintained by more than a few people.

I'll agree that it's a delicate tool. Similar to Lisp, CSS is very elegant in the right hands but also heavily reliant on the devs sticking to strong conventions and principles. On solo projects, or projects with just a couple of devs, it can be wonderful. But it does tend to have trouble scaling.

Which is why, even though I don't love them, I respect the usefulness of things like CSS Modules that impose more scoping and constraint over CSS codebases. For bigger teams they do tend to be necessary.

The question then comes, where would one go to learn the fundamentals-and what are they now?

Being someone who was ahead of the game in css 15 years ago, but not having touched it since - where would one go to understand the new fundamentals and options available?

The OP is a good outline of the most important stuff. This is my favorite comprehensive introduction to flexbox: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

And then follow it up with this one if you want to go a little deeper: https://css-tricks.com/flex-grow-is-weird/

Personally, I think flexbox is the single most versatile and important tool to be familiar with. You can create nearly any layout with it, in such a way that it's very naturally responsive almost by default.

Maybe I am wrong, but I would assume that the most sensible place to start with is the MDN Web Docs[0] in this case instead of looking for blog posts.

Throwing out blanket statements is dangerous for new comers, which seems to be the target audience of this article according to its title. For example, collapsing margin isn't always bad and unpredictable, it just seems that way if you didn't take the time to understand the fundamentals behind and go for "what works".

That's not too different to telling CS students to not worry about learning the memory and time complexities of different algorithms and just use [insert "best" algorithm] because it works most of the time.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS.

I would go for https://every-layout.dev/

These are actual practical usable fundamentals.

Complement that with http://inclusive-components.design/

Once upon a time Eric A Meyer's CSS: The Definitive Guide was the book to own.

These days, as mentioned in the OP, MDN is the best point of call for checking syntax or learning how to implement something new the right way.

This is a great recent book from an experienced practitioner - https://learningwebdesign.com/

Her explanation of positioning, responsive design and the links to other resources she provides inside are all good.

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