Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Most "problems" with CSS (with the exception of vertical centering and a few others) are caused by the fact that people can't be bothered to learn CSS.

It's funny: if a programmer is told to write CSS but doesn't know how, he'll copy-and-paste from Stack Overflow, get a shit result, and say that CSS sucks. If a programmer is told to write Elm but doesn't know how, he'll learn the language, write some decent Elm, and be happy. Now, who do you think will have the better time - the person that actually learned his tools or the person that copy-pasted CSS from Stack Overflow?

Even if you assume that CSS is as horrible as the author would have you believe, the 'solution' of Elm is preposterous. As another commenter [0] said: it outputs a crazy amount of divs, all the styles are inline, you lose the CSS ecosystem, and you lose performance. Even the demos of Elm for layout are completely broken.

[0] http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-07-02/css-is-unnecessary.htm...

My instinct was to disagree with you because I've been doing CSS for so many years and still find it frustrating. Then I realized in all of those years, you were right, I never did take the time to read a book on it.

I don't want to understand CSS deeply, because the fact is I hate using it. I find it overly difficult to get right. I find it illogical at times. I used to find figuring out the differences between browsers in regards to it a nightmare (not so much anymore). But, you're right, perhaps if I read a book, it would all be much easier. The 10 hour investment in really understanding a good book, would make the many years of messing with it and hoping it works seem wasted.

The only way I've kept my sanity is through using frameworks like Bootstrap. I feel like I rather delegate the responsibility of learning what I see as a mess to the designers of a CSS framework. I figure, if I can understand so many complex things well, and using CSS is still a challenge, it must be CSS, not me. But, maybe it is me. On the other hand I feel in my gut, after many years of working with Interface Builder/Visual Studio and other IDE's GUI layout tools, there must be a better way for non-designers (and designers for that matter) to do this.

That.

I actually learned CSS in a school. My teachers were real front-end developers.

I can honestly say that I never had any problem with CSS and that I never found it to be broken. The only issues that I think of come from trying to fix things for the old IE browsers, which are broken.

CSS itself? Mastered it in 3 months if not less.

Come on, people. You can't give me both "You are paid less because CSS is easy to learn!" and "CSS is so hard! I can't use it! We should create something new to remplace it!".

You seem new to this. Just keep centering variable height content vertically in variable height containers on different browseres until you get what's broken with CSS.

You can also try to pick up a newspaper (multicolumn) and try to replicate its layout so it behaves well with dynamic content.

You can easily do that...

The problem is trying to do that for every browser.

Both of those things are easy.

Doing both of those things in IE6 is hard.

To me, IE6 is broken, CSS isn't.

Ie6 is ancient history now. Ie9 is the new ie6.

In a way, yes. IE6 isn't something that I have to support anymore.

However, most clients actually pay an extra to have us support IE7 - 8. On responsive websites. With plenty of customization and fancy graphics.

I've spent ten years learning and using CSS and I still find it very hard to do even seemingly simple layout.

I spent about six months with QML before I was capable of beautiful, rich, animated graphical user interfaces. QML was a much nicer experience and I can get the results I want very quickly with few or no errors. CSS is a struggle every single time.

Is that just me not being bothered to learn CSS? Or could it possibly be that CSS really isn't that good a tool to begin with?

I've learnt many technologies over the years and I will no doubt learn many more. Your statements above don't consider the important question - the relative complexity of CSS compared to other aspects of web development.

"You can't be bothered to learn your tools" isn't terribly helpful when you've just given someone a hammerwrenchbathplug.

Sorry for the OT, but, a hammer-wrench-bath-plug is a lot more fun to imagine than a hammer-wrench-bathplug

I've found CSS no less confusing than Tk layouting, but maybe just because I know CSS layouting pretty well by now.

This all day. Take an online course on CSS, really grok the basics, pick a grid framework, and you're done. Should take less than a day to go over it, maybe a week of practice before CSS is another tool in your belt that you can wield with efficacy and ease. The more complicated stuff, it's fine to copy-paste from SO - no shame.

I've been working with CSS for a few years now, and I've read up on a lot of the intricacies, and I still find that I am constantly tweaking and searching for anything that I haven't previously solved (or that I solved a long time ago). And then when it works there's some browser that renders it a little bit differently.

I don't have that problem with any other part of the stack I use for web development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com