Re:Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid
by andrewingram on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @09:06AM
(#24697249)
The comparison with databases is an interesting one. I have observed in both that really diving into exploiting the domain in a language-native way (e.g. CSS or SQL) can lead to extremely powerful solutions, but ones which don't integrate very neatly into a broader system. So you usually find people inventing patterns, or restricting themselves to subset -- choosing to skip some of the power in favour of maintainability. You can build an entire system in just SQL and little-to-no other programming languages, but should you?
CSS is very much the same way. I can't tell you how many times I have seen CSS files that are a house of cards. One wrong element gets added into a markup and the whole thing crumbles. Unnecessary use of !important, wildcards, overly specific, not specific enough, inconsistent media queries, desktop-first layouts (as opposed to mobile-first, or often times a mixture of the two depending on the element), and so on. At first glance, the stakes for bad CSS also seem pretty low (which is not the case with databases or backend code). This further causes developers to just hack at it until it works or is "close enough". It instills bad habits that last years or even entire careers.