Very good article imo. I didn’t disagree with anything. I especially agree with the ugliness of the many class names in my html.
My problem I guess is reconciling how much of a pleasure it’s been to use. Perhaps I, a primarily backend developer historically, embody the death of web craftsmanship, but I don’t really want to learn modern CSS if I don’t have to 😅
The easier I can get something styled and back to doing actual business logic rather than making things pretty the happier I am. I highly respect frontend styling gurus but I’m not that interested in spending time mastering true web craftsmanship, I care more about delivering the product as fast and as beautifully to the user as possible.
I’d encourage you to take a look at modern CSS with a fresh eye. It’s gotten really good. Good enough I’ve got another blog post in the works talking about how much goddamned fun its gotten. In the last few years alone, we’ve got sass-style nesting, parent selectors (!), combinator selectors (roughly like list comprehensions in their ability to fill out a matrix of potential selectables), color functions, and far more.
wholeheartedly agree! css has been my main job for going on 15 years because i’ve always enjoyed its quirks. the past 5 years or so have felt like leaps and bounds in terms of how i structure markup and styling. it’s such a fun language to learn. stuff like flex and grid make my work so much easier so i can spend more time on the fun stuff.
But can you vertically and horizontally align something that isn’t text reliably by now?
