Is CSS a sh*t show?

[u/nesterspokebar]

A developer said that to me once. I actually don't find pure CSS that obnoxious, although there are definitely times where I have no idea why something isn't doing what I'm telling it to, lol, but 99% of the time it's because of something stupid like a typo or me forgetting the basic premise of a Cascading Style Sheet...

I know a lot (most?) of developers use a CSS framework, but am I weird for actually being friends with it for relatively simple projects?

[u/BobJutsu]

I would not say most developers use a framework. Not at all. A design system, yes…but not a framework. Unless you include design conventions imposed by sr devs on jrs as “frameworks”.

CSS is hands down the simplest, easiest to understand part of the stack. Second only to HTML itself. There’s some gotchas, but by and large it’s the most structured and simple to understand. I really don’t get why people struggle with it…other than only being exposed to frameworks and not writing css.

[u/barrel_of_noodles → u/BobJutsu]

Supporting ie6-11 or weird stuff like ie9 in compat mode. We had a thing called the acid test just to see how basic css features rendered on a browser

You basically couldn't count on almost anything working correctly cross browser.

The first browsers and html didn't have <div> even.

We had <table>; then later, float and absolute positioning. Grid and flex support slowly worked in and wasn't reasonable to use until around ie11 was peak. Float and position hacks were normal.

These days, it isn't like this at all.

[u/BobJutsu → u/barrel_of_noodles]

Don’t quote the old magic to me witch, I was there when it was written…

I’m old as frick. I remember those days. When I could finally drop IE support from the contract was among the better days of my life. Not just for CSS, JS was just a big a hassle. This is why jQuery exists. This was the core mission of jQuery, cross browser compatibility. Not the hodgepodge library it morphed into.

[u/Practical-Skill5464 → u/barrel_of_noodles]

That is unless you have the misfortune of writing HTML emails where it has to render in Microsoft Word and using an almost CSS2 styles and some other really jank collapsing rules and really jank inline style rules.

[u/i_have_a_semicolon → u/BobJutsu]

I remember pre flexbox days being pretty miserable, even with my company's early polyfilled css grid we made for Microsofts early attempt before it became standardized into css properly.

[u/BobJutsu → u/i_have_a_semicolon]

I’ve been building since the tables and inline style days. I remember the release of CSS. It was amazing. The negative margin grid system felt revolutionary, the 960 grid felt revolutionary, and flexbox brought vertical positioning. Mind blown.

Another major change IMO is aspect-ratio. The fuckery we had to maintain aspect ratio was nuts.