This article is wrong about React: it does not generates unreadable CSS class names. CSS in JS libraries do.

By default, using only react + react-dom, you can achieve the exact same output as "handwritten HTML + CSS".

But CSS in JS is not bad either: it generates unique class names by using murmurhash on rules and it makes a lot of sense in a component approach (you can see it like an automatic BEM method).

Even better: The main pain point of this approach (runtime cost) will soon entirely disappear. Linaria already provides a solution, Facebook will soon roll is own (called StyleX for now). It will create a stylesheet file with atomic CSS rules (one rule per class) and replace the classNames directly at compilation time, offering deduplication, eliminates of dead code and maintenability without sacrificing performances. IMHO a huge step in CSS development.

Styling, layout and Dom composition are so tightly coupled that being a CSS only developer would be impossible. Particularly in the react world where everything is JavaScript, good luck trying to write a component and pass it on to someone else styling it.

I agree that the scope of a front end developer is becoming very expansive, having to worry about accessibility concerns along with styling, performance, architecture is hard, but good teams usually cover all these things well enough combined.

Not every website has to be "an app". You can build pretty functional presentational websites and blogs using CSS only for front-end. I'm going as far as replacing client side scripts (e.g. google analytics) with server side alternatives for my small projects. And with features like lazy image loading already supported by browser this really makes front-end developer life easier.

This is one of my most important articles, on the issue of why I think the web industry is going in the wrong direction, hope you will like it

"CSS 3, unlike CSS 2.1, is an open standard, which means that it is continuously updated. "

No, that means it's unencumbered by licensing. It being a living document means it's continuously updated.

Really liked the article. It shows an interesting new perspective of how dev teams are working today and how they could benefit from having dedicated CSS developers.

If CSS is so complex that you can only be good at it at the exclusion of other fields, maybe it's too complex ?

What do you wanna do about it?

Remove CSS?

Make it less complex. CSS 4 maybe.

Is this the author's github? https://github.com/elad2412

> Is this the author's github? https://github.com/elad2412

Medium accounts are inherently linked to Twitter accounts.

The author of the article is using @elad [1] which maps 1-to-1 to Twitter [2].

In their Twitter profile there is a link pointing to their personal website [3].

Their personal website has a link to their main GitHub account [4].

GitHub account @elad2412 was created on July 01, 2012.

GitHub account @SaladFork was created on July 22, 2009.

[1] https://medium.com/@elad

[2] https://twitter.com/elad

[3] https://blog.eladshahar.com/

[4] https://github.com/SaladFork

Just to correct the last 2 links are wrong, these are my other links: [3] https://eladsc.com [4] https://github.com/elad2412

(My github isn't my main thing)