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Comment by rvieira | Hacker News Reader

Collection of retro CSS:

https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#fun...

I'm not an expert on css or npm so excuse my ignorance, but why is the recommended way to install several of these to do an npm install? shouldn't it just be adding a css file to your folder and referencing it?

And then how do you update it when there is a new feature or fix? Just remember to occasionally at random check if the random CSS you copy pasted has changed? How do you check if it's changed, go find any commits to look at the diff and compare?

Copy pasting random CSS around is why, as an example, a project I work on has multiple subtly different shades of blues, why margins and paddings are not consistent even on the same page, etc.

Sounds like a lot of work compared to npm update.

Sounds like the problem is poor documentation and project management.

Speaking as someone who builds massive web projects for a billion dollar company, I can state that nothing you describe is necessary if you document your work, maintain standards, and have recurring maintenance events.

CSS maintenance is not hard. It's just boring.

Yeah, you could do all of that, or you could just use a package manager.

But a package manager is a hundred-ton hammer when all you need is to decorate your little html page that you hand-edit and push with rsync.

You wanted a fun website but what you got is a dependency manager with a production CI/CD pipeline taking 15 min to check that yes, the sentence you wrote can in fact be written.

Package managers work, but isn't there some middle ground that doesn't involve depending on a runtime that itself is continuously updated ?

If all you're doing is making one little html page and pushing it up with rsync, then just download the .css file into your folder and carry on.

The existance of other methods doesn't preclude you from doing it whatever way you want to. The CSS file is right there on github to download https://github.com/micah5/PSone.css/blob/master/PSone.css

Yes but the original question is interesting: how do you make sure you're using the latest one ?

You could use the upstream URL, but that'd be a privacy issue.

You could proxy the upstream file, but that rules out static serving.

Maybe use a Makefile that fetches the last version and uses it ?

> Maybe use a Makefile that fetches the last version and uses it ?

That would be a package manager lol.

It does 80% of the job of a package manager with 20% of the complexity, I find that acceptable

>Yes but the original question is interesting: how do you make sure you're using the latest one ?

You don't, because you're rendering a simple html page, and whatever minor changes are in the new version are largely irrelevant.

>But a package manager is a hundred-ton hammer when all you need is

Unfortunately, this is the state of much of software development today. It's why most webpages are enormous. It's why massive increases to speed, processing power, and communication bandwidth have resulted in no real net increase to web-browsing speed for the last 10 years.

    It's why massive increases to speed, processing power, 
    and communication bandwidth have resulted in no real 
    net increase to web-browsing speed for the last 10 years.

nor to developer productivity, either. I feel that has massively decreased in the last decade.

There are clearly cases where complex build/CI/CD pipelines make sense, but people now believe they need big enterprisey FAANG-scale solutions even when they don't.

> isn't there some middle ground that doesn't involve depending on a runtime that itself is continuously updated ?

jsDelivr is pretty nimble in the regard. It mirrors GitHub and npm (and caches and (optionally) minifies the result) so depending on the project, you can get a specific release, or just pull from the master branch, by simply changing the URL of the CSS file.

CSS uses global rules, hierarchical inheritance, is rendered differently between browser engines/mobile platforms, includes lots of hacky ways to do the same thing, and has constantly evolving standards. CSS is Hard with a capital H.

Are you sure you're talking about the same thing as the parent comment? I believe they're discussing the maintenance and synchronisation of integrating third party .css file(s) into your code.

Because it’s the same workflow as working with big projects. Tools like vite gives you hot-reloading/fast refresh for HTML/CSS/JS workflow and cache busting/minifying your assets automatically.

I wish there was GTK1/2 styles.

Any examples of webpages using these frameworks?

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