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Comment by b_e_n_t_o_n | Hacker News Reader

CSS is easy, but it's not simple - it's enormously complex. Imagine the worst sins you could commit in a Ruby or Python codebase, multiply that by 100x and that's a normal CSS codebase.

The syntax has never been the issue imo.

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I know what the issues are on a large CSS codebase. I specifically mentioned them.

You are over exaggerating the problems IMO. Yes it is a pain when you are left with a mess, but there are ways of dealing with that.

It probably seems easy to you because you are already familiar with the pitfalls. For me, CSS felt like an endless minefield of unexpected interactions. When you say that "CSS is easy", do you perhaps mean only the syntax and the basic language structure? I would agree, but that doesn't get you very far; actually trying to use CSS frustrated me so much that I simply don't touch anything related to the web at all anymore.

I learned the basics in maybe a day almost 20 years ago now. I could make a page template with PHP and style that in maybe a day. This was back when IE6 was dominate, I don't think Firebug was even a thing.

At that time I was a novice, didn't know what a debugger was (I printed everything out the the console / page) and didn't know what an IDE was (I think I was using Notepad++). I managed this feat by following the tutorial.

The biggest problem I had was that I couldn't understand why centre, and colour didn't work. Once I realised that I had to spell everything in American English, that problem quickly went away.

I too learned the basics of CSS back in the IE6 era, and I had no trouble following the steps of the tutorials, using similarly primitive tools. If I'd had an experience like yours, I suppose my career might have gone in a different direction. Instead, though, as soon as I tried to take what I thought I had learned from those tutorials and make something of my own, I smashed into a wall of chaos; nothing seemed to be predictable. I knew the browser could do what I was imagining, because I had been making it do that for years already via tables and repeating GIFs and all that, but trying to do it with CSS got me nowhere.

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