This is so true. CSS has become a multi-headed Hydra whose parts appear completely unrelated to each other. I've been a developer and designer for more than 20 years and I have no idea what the parameter names and orders are for position, versus grids, versus float, etc. It's parameter soup. Who said the hardest part of programming is naming things? The CSS folks didn't get the memo.
To do any real work with CSS means you have memorize a bunch of conflicting weirdness and/or keep a reference page open at all times. The idea of CSS frameworks to simplify or fix this doesn't work because, in order to write or debug what you create in those frameworks, you must know regular old CSS!
It's turtles all the way down.
I agree with CSS being complicated, but this statement is true for pretty much everything. Not a day goes by I don’t close 20+ reference tabs at the end of the day, not counting what I closed throughout the day. It’s simply impossible to be a polyglot and not use references.
Who said the hardest part of programming is naming things? Some people do a better job than others. CSS is really wildly inconsistent within in itself. Is it another case of worse is better? Ugh. Probably.
I also made SnackUI to solve the last problems of fully inline styles: namely to make them work 100% between React Native and Web, to make them extract to atomic CSS on web automatically, to optimize even conditionals into CSS, and finally to make media queries and themes work the same between Native/Web. We’re launching a very large app with it here in not long, and I absolutely love how clear it is to work on.
Most of these "new" frameworks are more because someone wanted to scratch an itch or solve a specific problem they had, and frontend code simply lends itself well to being open sourced. If you don't like the new js tools that are made, just ignore them.
What I’ll forever complain about (as a front end developer) is that there’s no distinction between a document and an app. You can start from a blog post and turn it into a rocket just by throwing more JS at it.
I think only Google can fix it at this point:
- come up with a better alternative for apps
- reward websites that are content-only (or are guaranteed to support Reader view)
Now you could start to have simple documents and a powerful app platform.
Unfortunately this is hard to do as most developers will call bloody murder. So let’s enjoy CSS for the next hundred years, shall we?
Really? HTML is already heavy on syntax, and the whole point of SGML-style angle-bracket markup is to invisibly structure text hierarchically and sneak in rendering properties or other "metadata" not rendered to the user, via attributes. In which universe, then, has it ever made sense to write
rather than in a document representation language? Let alone today's CSS atrocities. Mind, I'm not talking about CSS' out-of-control layout model complexity, but inventing a new syntax (or a thousand microsyntaxes really) on top of already syntax-heavy markup.If you think about it, CSS appears to have gotten these ninja super-powers because HTML was locked in a decade-long stagnation while W3C was busy with XML, RDF, and whatnot. Then again, in the last decade using <div>s for nearly everything was frowned upon, so with the precedent set in the decade before, CSS just had to re-order, re-place, re-arrange ad absurdum without any discernible mental discipline. Or, maybe the CSS WG people just couldn't stop.
The end effect is that CSS isn't approachable for even seasoned graphic artists let alone laymen; another effect being browser complexity resulting in monopolies.
A false separation-of-concerns narrative has ruined many languages and approaches (such as enterprise OOP); for the web it was particularly idiotic given it's founded on composable documents.
JS? Once it was out there, evolution of HTML and declarative UIs basically stalled because there wasn't anything you couldn't do using JS. Nevertheless, CSS had also grown into outlandish complexity. Basically, the "web stack" of today is what any standardization effort should've avoided.