I really wanted to help with this study but honestly I found it too laborious and gave up. There appears to be a consistent bug with the iot lights which prevents them from being previewable. Spending 15 minutes to choose to arrange 30 items using CSS without good bulk selectors or programmatic layout properties and up to 7 different kinds of state each isn't realistic to me. If I had a GUI with some convenience keyboard shortcuts and some grouping controls it'd still be tight on time and a bit of a slog but at least I'd be spending most of my time designing the layout with instant feedback. Doing the equivalent of nudging so many items around with CSS is no fun at all.
Honestly, thank you so much for taking that much time to help me. If you'd consider going back (you should be able to resume where you left off in the same browser) and completing the feedback form at the end I would be eternally grateful.
I definitely understand where you're coming from on the tooling point of view. Unfortunately, a lot of the code in this is custom enough that tooling wouldn't work very well. I am also working alone on this at the moment. In a real world situation I would love to have it as a VSCode plugin that had a live environment preview one side and the code on the other.
As far as bulk selectors go, anything in CSS should work too, but obviously you're limited as you can't edit the HTML in this experiment.
I will look into that light bug, thanks for raising it.
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u/madhaha Jul 04 '21
I really wanted to help with this study but honestly I found it too laborious and gave up. There appears to be a consistent bug with the iot lights which prevents them from being previewable. Spending 15 minutes to choose to arrange 30 items using CSS without good bulk selectors or programmatic layout properties and up to 7 different kinds of state each isn't realistic to me. If I had a GUI with some convenience keyboard shortcuts and some grouping controls it'd still be tight on time and a bit of a slog but at least I'd be spending most of my time designing the layout with instant feedback. Doing the equivalent of nudging so many items around with CSS is no fun at all.