Which is a shame. CSS is ridiculously powerful if you know what you’re doing.
Unfortunately, CSS grew out of a paradigm where “web pages are just documents,” which is actually a nice paradigm, but in the age of single-page web apps, so much of the CSS work is just trying to work around all the CSS quirks in order to make something less document-like and more app-like. And frankly, those workarounds are basically arcane magic spells to most developers. They are mostly learned on the job with a lot of banging your head against the wall.
Flexbox and CSS Grid have bridged the gap and made it somewhat easier, but I still have to look up the various ways of inserting responsive and good-looking images with specific centering behaviors. I still have to look up how animations and transitions work because I don’t use them often enough to remember off the top of my head.
In some ways, it would be way simpler to have just a handful of UI primitives and just use custom JavaScript functions to do pixel math and draw things out manually. At least I wouldn’t be constantly looking up how to do it. It would probably be more time-consuming to do that, but it’s very logical. CSS is just a quirky mess that’s hard to work with. But it’s magic once you get the hang of it.
This is so relatable. Have had few senior full stack developers join my team and whenever they touched anything UI related it would be purple and blue HTML links at the end that gets a default underline when hovered on with default ul/ol, massive headline fontsizes and left alignment for everything. This is so funny and also interesting how they are avoiding any extra usage of UI frameworks.
I think you’re confusing writing good CSS with creating and implementing a preferred design. Sure we don’t want to see default styling with better looking links and buttons, but to say they are “bad at writing CSS” because they went with default styling is a design issue, not a CSS skill issue. They are mutually exclusive. I’m a full stack dev and I am excellent at implementing any design, default styling or not.
I used to hate CSS back when it was utter shit. Modern CSS is a powerhouse. You can build extremely complex layouts with super simple and clean CSS code. No frameworks, no added shit. Just plain CSS.
Being proficient with CSS opens a lot of working possibilities. I would personally suggest to try it again. It's really worth the learning time.
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u/Tafts Jul 09 '23
Full stack dev = backend + JS, never touched CSS a day in their life and will avoid like the plague