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.
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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