Knowing CSS is mastery to front end development
217 comments
·March 2, 2025bryanhogan
exceptione
From daisyui.com:
Tailwind CSS provides low-level utility classes, wich usually inlcude only one CSS rule.
daisyUI classes are a combination of multiple CSS rule that are named semantically for each part of the UI.
It seems like the whole dance is to avoid
class="btn" style="font-color: #3e3"
class="btn font-color-3e3"
wwweston
> and BEM because it was difficult to scope css.
I suspect this reflects the cultural problem that in many organizations no one really wants to create or stick to a systematic design.
Scoping CSS isn't trivial as a site grows large, but it's far from intractable.
Tailwind's orientation on concrete details everywhere is the "just give up" solution -- stop trying to get the organization and culture to do work they don't want to do.
EDIT: I'd also guess there's an element of poor feedback loops for most development tools. When people people talk about things like "I don't want to have to look up what every class means", they're speaking to one reality of code componentization across the multiple dimensions of styling/semantics/markup/logic in development environments that often can't support interactive, legible, and interconnective feedback as development is done. There are probably solutions to this but they're more involved and less well known or fungible than just collapsing styling/semantics/markup into a single dimension around a consistent constrained UI domain language you can add to your resume in a week tops. This is friendlier to the predominant "culture" for building front ends right now.
exceptione
> Tailwind's orientation on concrete details everywhere is the "just give up" solution
Yes, and that is why I am genuinely curious whether going the nuclear approach is still needed, or that css variables, @scope and what-not of today solves the problems of the past.
Because it seems that Tailwind introduces problems that CSS sought to resolve, and now DaisyUI seeks to resolve the problems of Tailwind.
Are we now at a point that devs do not know enough about the basics and are mentally stuck on tools they do know? Or is it that the old problems still have not been solved?
crooked-v
For me, it's always been much less of a technical thing, and much more that the material coming out of the product design part of the business is never actually consistent enough that you can have a single consistent CSS file drive the whole site.
meerita
It's a bias to think the problem is people not knowing how to architect a good CSS solution. The reality is projects are maintained by multiple people over the course of its life. OOCSS only brings technical debt and constraints, and not to mention bloated CSS files. A good explanation why OCSS is bad https://www.fcss.club/manifesto and why functional CSS or atomic css is better in the short and long-term https://www.fcss.club/why. Tailwind just brings more complexity.
notjustanymike
It's not font-color 3e3, it's font-red-300. That's an important distinction, because the second one respects the design system your art team spent a lot of time establishing. By using their language you normalize the set of styles utilized in an application, instead of individually and repeatedly hard coding the hex values.
Second off, tailwinds true power becomes way more obvious if you consider pseudo selectors like lg: and hover:.
jmull
Something at the level of bootstrap or daisyui makes a lot of sense to me, a developer.
But designers I've worked with -- and I've really got to defer to their expertise here -- often seem to be too constrained by the fixed design structure on what I'll call "signature" sites or pages. For things that aren't that important/visible, sure, these general systems work well enough. But for other things, there's a specific vision they are trying to achieve, and forcing that through something like daisyui and bootstrap is a hell of a lot more work (for me) than building from css directly, or from utility classes like tailwind provides.
I think the reality is, the developer is building *app-level* components from html, css, and js. Naturally, you reach for something to take drudgery out of it, thus you work in terms of a middle-level abstraction. daisyui and tailwind are both such abstractions, so from a high-level there's isn't really much distinction or argument to be had. tailwind is somewhat lower level and more flexible while daisyui does more for you at the cost of reduced flexibility. Obviously, you pick something like daisyui when you're pretty sure you don't want/need the extra flexibility of tailwind, or tailwind when you're in doubt. Since you're going to have an app-level library of components, it's just not a big deal either way, just a matter of how pleasant it will be to develop and maintain those components.
grandempire
Lately I’ve been using bootstrap grid only and been happy with that.
bluSCALE4
The sad reality is that younger folks are too busy learning JS and backend devs just don't understand it. I've yet to learn new CSS patterns from anyone I've worked with in front end in the last 6 years. On the same note, I've worked on a few teams that have made backwards decisions and have chosen dead tools instead of embracing new CSS patterns. I think I have to take Ana Tudo, Lea Verou and Rachel Andrew for doing enough advocacy to keep my skillset relevant.
madeofpalk
I think CSS gets all the flack it gets unfairly because people often run into it as a byproduct of other work they do. Whereas these developers probably aren’t running into windows/macos/ios/android app development.
wruza
I’ve ran into almost all of this, and css is still the worst thing in the list. It’s literally the highest wtf/gfy per minute among all. Barely debuggable, inconsistent, comefrom by design, inarticulate crap.
dsego
Especially since all the things that one would expect should be easy were just really difficult to do for a long time, things like vertically centering, layouts before grid/flex, changing a style in one place and not accidentally breaking some other part of html. There was a lot of tribal knowledge about browser quirks, how to clear floating divs for example, selector precedence, how margins collapse, etc, it's all just non-essential complexity that bites you in the ass when you have the least time to deal with it.
christophilus
Agreed. No static typing. Everything is global. Super easy to accidentally break a thing on some other page that you aren’t aware of. It’s just a brittle stack. Tailwind is by far my favorite bandaid for dealing with all of that. Perfect? No. But it’s the best thing I’ve used in almost 25 years doing this professionally.
kevinsync
I haven't had a chance to read the all the comments so this may have already been mentioned further down the line, but -- IMO mastering CSS (vanilla) is essential to understanding how browsers render content, which itself is vital to understanding how to structure content (and by extension, write browser JavaScript)
Just learn it! It's worth it. It also makes Tailwind and all those abstractions way easier to grasp.
P.S. Sass (SCSS) is incredibly powerful. Learn that too!
moralestapia
I never got the appeal of Tailwind, it's almost a 1-to-1 map from style="" to classname="", they just made the terms slightly easier to remember.
Tailwind is a prime example on how good marketing can help you win a market, even if the alternative is free, even if it's already crowded, even if your product is trash. Marketing wins.
Edit: I have used Tailwind, a lot. Recently, upgrading from v3 to v4 in a Next.JS project, which was supposed to be a no brainer, turned out to be a four hour ordeal. I cannot spend that much time just to make sure that "background-color: red" still works, lmao, it is such a travesty. Because of that, I'm in the process of removing it from my projects now.
chamomeal
That’s exactly what I thought until I actually tried tailwind. Now I really like it.
It has pros and cons like anything though. Trying to style a fundamental component is pretty painful. Like imagine your company’s main “button” element. It’s got 8 different sizes, optional icons on both sides, animations, styles, each needing to support different color combos. Tailwind is miserable for that. You get giant huge balls of spaghetti classes all over your button, and it’s pretty incomprehensible.
But for “glue” styles, it’s freakin amazing. Putting those components together, giving them spacing, even making simple components that don’t have lots of conditional properties? It’s really nice. You can style stuff quickly and consistently right from the markdown, you don’t have to think of classnames for every teeny little thing, and you can somewhat imagine what stuff looks like just by looking at the jsx.
I remember the crazy hype around it when it got popular, and it really put me off. Didn’t even try it for a long time. Now I’m in a codebase that doesn’t have it, and I miss it! I don’t miss it terribly, but it was a nice little QOL upgrade
codetrotter
> You can style stuff quickly and consistently right from the markdown, you don’t have to think of classnames for every teeny little thing, and you can somewhat imagine what stuff looks like just by looking at the jsx.
I still don’t understand what it brings over putting style= whatever on the element.
Zardoz84
> Like imagine your company’s main “button” element. It’s got 8 different sizes, optional icons on both sides, animations, styles, each needing to support different color combos. Tailwind is miserable for that. You get giant huge balls of spaghetti classes all over your button, and it’s pretty incomprehensible.
.brand-btn {}
.brand-btn--inverted {}
.brand-btn--icon-right {}
.brand-btn--smaln {}
.brand-btn--smaller {}
.brand-btn--big {}
<button class="brand-btn brand-btn--icon-right brand-btn--small brand-btn--inverted" />
However, very rarely need too many combinations of the same button with a brand logo.
zelphirkalt
If you got lots of "custom" styling for elements, why can't one write a CSS class just as easily and give the element that class? Why is Tailwind better? Am I not also writing the definitions in Tailwind then and assigning those classes to my element then? I don't get what the benefit is supposed to be.
imiric
Agreed. Tailwind is an abomination.
Its biggest problem is that it's a leaky abstraction. The classes translate _almost_ 1:1 to the equivalent CSS, but not quite and not always. In the best case scenario, you use a utility class and don't think about the CSS. In the worst, you must understand both how to implement the feature in CSS and how Tailwind does the translation. Then you need to think how to make Tailwind do what you want to do in CSS.
All of this adds a considerable amount of mental overhead while developing. And in the best case scenario developers don't even bother learning CSS, which eventually leads to a stagnation of knowledge. It wouldn't surprise me if some junior frontend developers don't even understand CSS, and just call themselves "Tailwind developers".
Yes, all abstractions move the focus to a higher layer up the stack, but the troubling thing with Tailwind is that on one hand it pretends that it's a lightweight abstraction (or not an abstraction at all[1]!), while at the same time causing confusion and degradation of knowledge of what it's supposed to be abstracting.
And then there's the insanity of seeing dozens of utility classes on elements, where if you're not careful, each one could look and behave slightly differently. The number of times I've been tempted to just change the margin value on a single element to fix something is too high. It reminds me of the ` ` and single-pixel GIF spacer hacks we used decades ago. The claimed solution to this are components, which sometimes are not a good fit, or grouping utility classes into a single class, but then why am I using Tailwind at all? There are also libraries like DaisyUI built on top of Tailwind to resolve this problem, but the thought of piling more abstractions on this Jenga tower makes me shudder.
I can understand why developers who are not great designers would find it appealing, and how it could be useful while prototyping, but in both cases using plain CSS (with some pre-processor, if you must) would be more maintainable and beneficial for the developer in the long run, while only slightly more inconvenient in the short-term.
kristiandupont
>All of this adds a considerable amount of mental overhead while developing
Not in my experience.
Cu3PO42
For the longest time, I didn't get it either. It took me actually trying it out in a project to like it. It's true, much of it is the same as writing inline-styles, but it's also more powerful than that. Here's a few things that I like about it:
- Ability to use pseudo-selectors, etc. in "inline-styles"
- Limited set of predefined values to use for padding, margin, and such that make it a bit easier to stay consistent
- Some helpful utilities like good looking shadows and animations
Sure, I could achieve all of that in a different way. Nothing about it is ground-breaking or even unique, but it's a nice package that works well for me.
dsego
> Limited set of predefined values to us...
With the ability to predefine css constants I guess it's now possible to use the style prop directly and not have to use raw hex colors and pixel values (eg. there are css libraries with these https://open-props.style).
arvinsim
> Recently, upgrading from v3 to v4 in a Next.JS project, which was supposed to be a no brainer, turned out to be a four hour ordeal.
You might think that is too long but that amount of time to migrate IMO is short.
What I am dealing now is a mix of styled components, SCSS and global styles. 4 hours is not even close enough to deal with half of it.
I will take TailwindCSS any day over this mess.
code_for_monkey
i think theres a divide between people who have worked in good front end repos and ones whove worked in horrible ones. I had to work on an app that was a mix of styled components, scss, inline styling, and globals. It was a wreck and every change took longer because of all the spaghetti styling you had to eat, Id take tailwind in a heartbeat over that.
zelphirkalt
> Edit: I have used Tailwind, a lot. Recently, upgrading from v3 to v4 in a Next.JS project, which was supposed to be a no brainer, turned out to be a four hour ordeal. I cannot spend that much time just to make sure that "background-color: red" still works, lmao, it is such a travesty. Because of that, I'm in the process of removing it from my projects now.
What does "it" relate to in the last sentence? Tailwind or Next.JS?
Anyway, making sure that background color still works, is that an argument for Tailwind? Wouldn't that be a great argument for simply using standard CSS properly?
pessimizer
>> I never got the appeal of Tailwind
They're not arguing for Tailwind. They have used Tailwind.
kristiandupont
>Marketing wins
TIL that I have just been manipulated and that my joy of using it is really just ignorance. Good to know.
tacker2000
Isnt daisyui exactly what we were doing before the tailwind stuff came about? Are we now full circle again and need an entire plugin to handle this?
wetpaws
[dead]
Zardoz84
Every time that I see someone talking about Tailwind like a panacea, I put weird faces. For looks a weird way to write a style attribute to a HTML tag. Something that MUST be avoided.
karaterobot
It's astonishing to me how many front end developers refuse to learn how to use vanilla CSS and Javascript, and the lengths they go to avoid touching them. I think of a lot of modern web tooling as a giant mech suit developers climb into to do battle with the underlying technologies of the web. There's so many layers of abstraction between you and the medium you work in, you can go your whole career without learning how to build a website yourself.
The original justification was 'scaling' (a word that stands behind a lot of bad behavior, actually), because you cannot just write bare CSS for a large production website, obviously. But then it creeps down the ladder until pretty soon your hobby website is a 20 megabyte SPA with 500 NPM packages backing it.
bob1029
It has never been easier to build web applications with a vanilla stack.
In 2010 there existed incredibly solid arguments for abstraction over the DOM. You had browsers with insane quirks and you had no choice but to support them. Over a decade and a half later, I'd argue we are in a completely different world. The only browser that bites my hand these days is Safari, and it's barely a nibble compared to what we used to deal with.
Those who adapt to the new reality will likely outpace those who continue to hobble themselves with rusty old training wheels.
evantbyrne
As with any profession, most workers are just proficient in whatever they need to do. The people littering these things with comments about how Tailwind is "enough" are probably telling the truth for their personal experiences. A lot of web developers don't have professional experience working with designers and implementing software to visual specifications.
rekabis
> and Javascript, and the lengths they go to avoid touching them.
I love CSS. I can make it do a tap dance and enjoy getting into the weeds with it.
JavaScript… is an entirely different ball of wax.
You see, I was there in the beginning, where major breaking changes in JavaScript existed not only between the major browsers, but also between point releases of the same damn browser.
I tried. Really, I tried. But after a few years I realized I had an epic case of PTSD where JavaScript is concerned, and to this day I see it as Lucifer’s own programming language, explicitly designed to drive developers mad.
What compounds this is a total refusal by the developers of JavaScript to do what every single other programming and scripting language out there has done copiously, and even eagerly - to deprecate old and obsolete features, and especially bad design choices. JavaScript does none of this, choosing instead to layer more inadvisable workarounds over already-traumatizing bad decisions.
Which is why I eagerly await the death of JavaScript at the hands of WebAssembly. Good riddance to a pox on the Internet.
gjsman-1000
I think you miss the point.
Having 25 developers trying to manage a CSS stylesheet together while naming classes does not scale.
Having 25 developers not worry so much about stepping on other people’s toes with Tailwind scales better.
Or in a nutshell: What is one of the hardest problems in CS? Naming things. What is Tailwind’s biggest feature? Build a frontend with minimal need to name things.
exceptione
25 developers working in the same module? Without a common style?
Afaik we came from plain CSS -> BEM, because scoping styles was hard, so people found a discipline in naming things to isolate styling. Scoping did not exist in CSS.
Then we got a movement from BEM -> Tailwind, because doing the scoping by hand was a bit difficult(?)
Then we get Tailwind -> Tailwind + DaisyUI because Tailwind results in messy concretion.
--------
The question I have: are the modularity/scoping primitives in modern css good enough now, rendering Tailwind e.a obsolete?
Are we still using Tailwind because people do not understand the original problem?
Maybe someone can enlighten me.
tengbretson
Going from plain CSS to BEM more or less meant abandoning the "cascade" part of CSS. We've basically spent the last 15 years styling our markup directly, bouncing back and forth between different strategies for doing so in the most capable, and aesthetically palatable way possible.
azangru
> does not scale
CSS already has @layer; and @scope is coming (waiting for firefox).
There are naming conventions like bem. There are also tools to guarantee unique class names (css modules, 'single-file components' in various js frameworks).
There are design systems to standardize and reduce the amount of CSS.
There are web components, with their styles encapsulated in the shadow DOM.
isodev
> Having 25 developers trying to manage a CSS stylesheet together
As opposed to 25 developers trying to manage a React component together? I don't think that's feasible either.
dsego
Hence why companies adopt UI toolkits, otherwise it gets messy. Without discipline it's hard to develop a set of core components and often times devs will duplicate work and fail to extract common parts due to the nature of working on features across the stack and failing to recognize common patterns.
alt227
Why on earth would you ever have 25 front end developers editing the same classes in the same stylesheet?
gjsman-1000
12 year old project, 2 developers per year, turnover every year. That’s all it takes.
jakelazaroff
CSS modules solved the classname collision problem years prior, though.
recursive
When people say "CSS modules", I never know which one they mean. There's a feature on the spec track for CSS "imports". There's also a family of webpack plugins with various behavior. CSS modules, collectively solved it a number of times with various trade-offs. You can even end up with multiple kinds of CSS modules in the same code base.
sfsefwafawfa
Hard agree, written Tailwind since the very inception. I love it for exactly this, the purging, JIT, arbitrary values, plus you can just write plain CSS any time you want. I have used Tailwind on big FAANG sites and boutique shops. Worked great for both, scales, and is very customizable.
iammrpayments
I’m forking Shopify’s polaris-react library for my personal use and some of the components are clearly made to people who don’t know how to use CSS.
For example, there’s a component called “InlineStack” which is just a javascript wrapper for a div with flex. This stuff drives me nuts.
prezjordan
You're leaving out the most important bit of a component like InlineStack: the props [0]. Yes you can just apply `display: flex` to the div you're working on, but like any proper abstraction these guardrails make using flexbox correctly the easiest path forward (the "pit of a success").
[0]: https://github.com/Shopify/polaris/blob/eb6161f6b4e02679b5e8...
dsego
Because sometimes you just need a flex wrapper. And it's easier to see InlineStack everywhere in your JSX than deciphering the layout from mixed CSS. Whereas plain CSS separates some concerns away from HTML, it also intermingles different concerns together, like layout, positioning, spacing, look & feel, etc. At least with structural or utility components like Stack, Group, Flex, or whatever it makes it more obvious what the intent is.
Zardoz84
Then you are doing something wrong about the layout & components in the page.
dsego
I'm in good company with all the modern UI toolkits and css libraries that have utility classes and container components which make the code I write reusable and composable. It's way better than using classes as "hooks" to style the markup and end up with a nesting of selectors to specifically target elements. You could compare it to HTML actually, I use a <stack> the same you would a <table>, and not reinvent with some custom wrapper like <div class="basketball-scores"> just to have a name attached so I can style it.
korm
It's a bit like the <center> tag. A codebase that's littered with stuff like "InlineStack" is harder to work with and parse because the resulting div soup still requires extra styling, which is now both markup and CSS.
dsego
Why is it harder to work with? It makes it immediately obvious what the visual layout is and what the purpose of the component is and a lot of time all you want to do is have a flex on a component and you don't need other CSS to warrant yet another CSS class. It's the same reason why utility CSS was created (eg <div class="flex">). It also saves you from having to come up with a semantic name in your CSS for every wrapper.
Compare the following:
<Stack gap={2} direction="row">
<Box>
<Avatar />
</Box>
<Box>
<Button />
</Box>
</Stack>
-----
<MyCustomWrapper>
<InnerChild>
<Avatar>
</InnerChild>
<InnerChild>
<Button />
</InnerChild>
</MyCustomWrapper>iammrpayments
I think this looks way simpler
<div className=“flex gap-2”>
<Button/>
<Avatar/>
<\div>
nfw2
The benefit of components like InlineStack is that the components then have names that semantically describe their purpose in the layout.
yolo3000
The fragmentation this creates is not worth it, we're building the tower of Babel of web technologies. If you look at 'modern' web applications every html component is rephrased into something like this 'inlinestack' crap.
yurishimo
The tower of Web Babel was built 5 years ago during peak React. It’s gotten better tbh as more competition has creeped into the web space due to React dropping the ball and resting on their laurels.
While I understand the gut reaction to seeing something like InlineStack, it’s not any different than a utility class except the abstraction has been made on the component level instead of the CSS level within a bunch of different components. The other thing is that these types of components provide a layer for abstraction that extends beyond the web. If I’m writing a app that targets web and native mobile, I can let the compiler decide which version to place in the build to take advantage of native features of the platform.
At a certain scale, programming becomes about maintaining consistency at said scale and less about the craftsmanship of an individual component. As a developer who also enjoys writing CSS and building layouts myself by hand, I understand your frustration but it’s misguided towards a group of developers who are trying to solve different problems.
We don’t need to implement everything that FAANG comes up with in their “innovation labs” and I 100% believe that there is a place for handcrafted code in applications for decades to come. But let’s not lose site of the fact that table saws haven’t replaced hand saws. They serve different purposes for different audiences and that’s okay!
Towaway69
I’d personally prefer to write markdown instead of html, especially when writing comments on sites like these.
But I have to know that stars represent html italic tags (and bunches of other stuff).
Thankfully this has been standardised and every markdown parser knows what stars mean. So I only have to learn this once.
Most frameworks haven’t been standardised and that’s where the frustration lies.
Abstraction is good when it becomes a commonality, bad when it remains niche.
bryanrasmussen
Why is InlineStack any more semantic than say FlexDiv?
Semantics is at some point arbitrarily agreed upon and memorized.
dsego
It's not, FlexDiv is just another name for Stack, they are describing the same aspect. Eg. you can imagine one CSS library using Flex, one Group and the third one Stack for the same concept, eg. some other UI frameworks use VBox and HBox. But it is still different from TopSectionHeader, SectionHeaderInner, SectionBodyWrapper, or whatever other names you have to come up with to give your component "semantic" meaning according to their content.
nfw2
Because flex just references the layout engine, and div intentionally has no semantic meaning. Fwiw I don't think InlineStack is a particularly good name either, but the criticism of this needs more justification than just "it's not how we did things in the past".
Semantics evolve over time. This is true of natural language and coding practice.
iammrpayments
I instead use <div class=“flex”><\div> now.
If the class name is not enough for me to guess, I just hover the class name and the LSP will show me the applied styles.
Another issue is that Shopify changes the name of these components for no reason, for example InlineStack was once called Inline, then HorizontalStack, then InlineStack, while the flex box model hasn’t change since 2012
alberth
CSS for styling is straight forward (which makes sense since ‘CSS’ is cascading ‘styling’ sheets)
CSS for layout takes sometime getting use too.
For me, the benefit of any css framework is not in prepackaged styles - it’s in simplifying layout for desktop/tablet/phone.
phartenfeller
For me TailwindCSS actually was helpful in learning CSS. You still apply the same core CSS fundamentals. If you created a complex layout in Tailwind, you can also do it in normal CSS. I look up the exact rules behind their classes frequently in their docs.
If you just copy classes and don't care to understand them, it's a different story of course.
robin_reala
You don’t apply the same core fundamentals because Tailwind works to specifically remove the core fundamental of CSS: the cascade.
kristiandupont
I guess, but that has certainly been a huge relief in my personal experience.
nfw2
yes, specificity wars make it really hard to reuse components across multiple product domains and teams within a large org.
by css fundamentals, they just mean what the various style properties do.
Sateeshm
How does tailwind remove cascading? It's just css classes.
paradox460
Also removes the sheet, fwiw
RealCodingOtaku
The mastery to front end development is understanding the semantics of HTML.
At every single company I worked for, I had to teach people to stop using div tag for everything. You can style things however you want, or even create components that the browser does not allow you to style (as long as you have fallbacks).
paradox460
I beat this drum for a while, got ignored, and dropped it.
Then an accessibility lawsuit came in and suddenly people were very interested in the semantic meaning behind each tag
rekabis
> I had to teach people to stop using div tag for everything.
And the crazy nesting of divs 5, 10, or even 15 layers deep.
Like… _no._ Just hand your senior card back to the issuer, and go back to being a junior. If you cannot create a simple layout with only 2-3 layers of divs _at most,_ there is something seriously wrong with your front-end skill set.
dsego
I've seen juniors style divs as buttons, it's disheartening.
azemetre
I’ve seen seniors do the same thing.
The root cause always seem to be the same.
Pressure to get things done now. No time in the future to correct things. Possibility of getting fired for falling behind your peers that make the same shortcuts while you attempt to do things better.
It’s always an issue with management that doesn’t care about doing things correct. So the incentive to keep your job is always perverse.
alt227
> I had to teach people to stop using div tag for everything
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean please?
null
jfengel
Does HTML even have semantics? You practically can use div for everything, and then use CSS to make it act like whatever component you wanted.
You should let the defaults do their job, but they don't do very much. HTML's main semantic is to give things a hierarchical structure. Visually it's a free for all after that
theandrewbailey
Yes, html has lots of semantic elements.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Semantics#...
neontomo
> but they don't do very much
no no no, different elements have different behaviours. for example, a button automatically has accessibility features like being able to tab to it and select with Enter key, which is essential for a screenreader. do that with a div and you end up building the functionality from scratch.
if all you care about is the visuals, sure, there's little difference, but once you scratch the surface you will have a poor product by not using the correct elements (where there is a clear "correct" ofc, sometimes it's subjective).
sickblastoise
Svelte 5 does a great job of raising warnings for this. You try to use an onclick on a div you get warning to make it tab-able and give it an aria role, and a reccomendation that you should probably be using a button.
agos
it's also essential for keyboard navigation. accessibility is not only for people who have some impairment!
ulrischa
"Knowing" CSS in these days is nearly impossible. There are so many language features. Don't get me wrong: CSS today is cool and nearly anything is possible (can Doom run wirh CSS by the way?), but I work as frontend dev for years and I have not the feeling I really know CSS in depth
soulofmischief
It just sounds like you need to spend more time solving problems with CSS. "Knowing" CSS means being able to style most things without needing to check any resources or otherwise look for help.
Occasionally there might be a particular issue that requires contemplation or reading the manual, but that is true of any sufficiently complex design system, especially a living specification such as CSS.
I recommend familiarizing yourself with new features as they are adopted. For example, front end devs are going to need to learn Houdini.
wruza
I spent some honest time solving the problems in css. You know what was the industry/search approved solution 90% of the times? Some greasy hack that assumes sizes and doesn’t translate elsewhere or generalize into experience. You just start to know how to make a single x of X, but X is still as big.
Css is a pile of low-effort crap targeted specifically at ad-hoc problems web designers had. It can make front pages, and sucks at everything else.
soulofmischief
That was way back, things are a lot better now than they were 15 years ago. Anyway, I got by quite far never assuming sizes with hacks like `height: 0; padding: 100%;` etc. But that kind of stuff is almost never needed today to get good results.
> It can make front pages, and sucks at everything else
I've made some very slick apps and widgets over the years using CSS. CSS isn't the problem, a lack of imagination is. CSS actually covers quite a lot of cases today, and with Houdini etc being exposed, the sky will soon be the limit.
mattlondon
There is knowing and there is knowing.
I don't pretend to know every dark corner of typescript, neither for CSS. But knowing enough detail to be efficient and write maintainable and easily extendable code is important.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
bob1029
I think knowing what to ask and where to look represents mastery of CSS.
Understanding the approximate power of things like flexbox and having some aesthetic taste is much of the battle. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty. CSS is almost entirely about art. Figure out which paint brushes and techniques work best for you. There are a lot of viable paths.
econ
That was then, now it is a 3d engine.
mablopoule
No, it has a 3d engine, one that you can happily ignore 99.9999% of the time. CSS has a few gotcha, a few things to got to understand about it (selectors, selector priority and the way content flow depending on absolute / relative positionning), but it is not an impossible language to pick up, far from it.
As the grandparent comment said, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
postepowanieadm
After reading mixu/cssbook I felt I knew and understood CSS quite well. But it was 10 years ago! Every new feature brings new edge cases that combine with all existing edge cases. Add some features like WebComponents and you have far too much undefined behaviour.
soulofmischief
What undefined behavior have you encountered with CSS?
postepowanieadm
Tables and Web Components combined with grid or flex is where magic happens.
bryanrasmussen
how many features does CSS - the language - have now in comparison to JavaScript?
How many features do the various APIs altogether have.
How many features do the various object models have, CSSOM, SVG DOM, HTML DOM, Shadow DOM...
What is your knowledge of all these features in comparison to CSS features?
Jumping off of that and go look at any mature language and CS subject, there is probably too much for you "know" completely, but there is of course possibility to "know" a general argument for how to use it properly, once that is known individual things is just looking up syntax.
bryanrasmussen
ok evidently someone thought that all of these things are easier to know than CSS, which is just ludicrous, and gave me a downvote to let me know their disapproval of my opinion.
Very Classy. But not CSS Classy.
JansjoFromIkea
I wouldn't get too hung up on downvoting online, ignoring deliberately malicious actors the range of reasons for downvoting can go from "this person posted a hate crime" to "other people already posted something close enough to this" or even "this person gave a perfectly valid answer but it does not feel like it's taking the discussion in the direction I feel it's meant to go"
econ
I knew css at a time, then it ran away from me and mocked me from afar.
sublinear
These jokes, as lightheartded as they are, need to stop. Especially true on here.
arvinsim
In this age of LLMs and AI, the incentive to master CSS is even lower.
bpev
Frankly, I feel like it goes even further than CSS. People don't really talk about HTML that much, probably just because it doesn't change as much as JS frameworks, etc. But that doesn't mean you should ignore it completely and just use a bunch of divs!
When you start digging into all the different HTML elements and aria guidelines (for example, the differences between `<nav />` and `<menu role="menubar" />`), I think development starts to be a bit more clear, because you start to see how your tools are intended to be used. I think it also makes decisions around CSS styling more clear. And as a bonus, your code just starts becoming more accessible, which is nice.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
ripped_britches
This is why I fully moved to flutter. Everything, including styling, is just a widget. It’s surprisingly liberating to write boring C# looking code that accurately describes a UI component without inheritance, overrides, style compiling, etc
notpushkin
It also throws away HTML and throws everything on a canvas instead, which means three things:
1. Accessibility is now an afterthought
2. Giant runtime you have to download for every website
3. Bewildering non-native behaviour on mobile
ripped_britches
Agree with you on the runtime. Things are better with wasm and wasmgc, but still you can’t use flutter for any website that cares about SEO.
However for the “app” part (after sign in) it’s a one-time download, cached by service worker, only takes a split second.
It would be really nice if flutter could produce a AOT compilation of the “semantic” HTML for the initial page and then hydrate it. Then it’d be pretty similar to waiting for JS bundles for interactivity.
notpushkin
My main gripe is that the DOM backend never took off. The WASM <-> DOM interop is cheaper than ever, especially if you bundle operations so that you don’t need to cross it as often. Still, they decided to implement everything from scratch :-(
amonith
Same, as C# dev I love Flutter. However I just know in my bones that Google will ditch it some day. It's been too many years without significant adoption and it will stop making sense in the corporate spreadsheet one day.
frou_dh
At least according to this post which was on HN recently, Flutter lacking significant adoption is a myth: https://shorebird.dev/blog/dart-macros/#:~:text=Flutter%20ha...
llama_drama
> Everything, including styling, is just a widget.
And that's the downside. What would be just two or three nested <div>s in HTML+CSS turns into several screens of widgets, making navigation and debugging much harder. I once had an issue with extra margin in one of Flutter's built-in widgets and spent hours trying to figure out why - without success.
b0m
Hi. C# dev here. Would you please elaborate a bit how do you use flutter and C#?
baueric
I think he means Dart code resembles C# pretty closely.
pjmlp
Basically why Flash ruled back in the day.
noelwelsh
Between Tailwind and LLM generation I doubt I'll ever write more than a handful of CSS lines by hand in any future project I work on. CSS has, for me, become like the ASM output of the compilers I use. The result is good enough 99.999% of the time for me and I want to work at a higher level of abstraction.
Boltgolt
Interesting, I can type CSS much much quicker than describing to an LLM what kind of layout I want and with what look
noelwelsh
I find LLMs are best for creating the template, or filling in gaps of my knowledge. Examples:
1. Using a prompt like "Using Tailwind, create a three column layout with main content in the center column and smaller side columns for ancillary information" will generate HTML + CSS faster than I can type.
2. I use the LLM to generate some CSS styling for setting a background blur, which was something I hadn't done before using Tailwind. It created code faster than I could find things in the documentation, though I had to go and patch it up later. In essence it pointed me in the right direction.
If I'm looking at a preview and want to change the styling of a particular element it is usually faster to directly edit it myself than get an LLM to do that. Tailwind makes this faster as the CSS is right there on HTML; I don't have to switch between stylesheet and HTML.
skydhash
1. I’ve mostly gone to the grid section of the docs of whatever framework I’m using (bulma these days) and copy paste the example, then copy paste my own code when I have enough pages done.
> Tailwind makes this faster as the CSS is right there on HTML; I don't have to switch between stylesheet and HTML.
I mostly use the web inspector for live edits to get a feel then I copy over the final result to the sheet. For more complex components, I use Codepen.
OsrsNeedsf2P
The downvoted comment is correct. The only CSS I've used in the last couple years has been to debug issues Claude couldn't resolve - and to delete excess styling that wasn't being applied anywhere.
It has given me the flexibility, accuracy, scalability, and proved the test of time (going strong on 3 years)
rossant
Wow, so much hate against CSS here. I like CSS. I first learnt CSS in 1999 or something. Granted, it has grown much more complex (and powerful) since then, it has a lot of quirks, but it's not that bad.
Lately, I've built simple websites and small web apps in vanilla Javascript and CSS, without using any framework, and it's much more enjoyable than years ago.
beryilma
> Lately, I've built simple websites and small web apps in vanilla Javascript and CSS
Any public links?
rossant
See this for instance: https://atlas.internationalbrainlab.org/
All vanilla JS, HTML, CSS, SVG, except for the 3D widget which is based on Unity.
rekabis
I agree wholeheartedly. And IMO, CSS isn’t even difficult, it just requires you to properly and effectively visualize the cascade to handle downstream effects.
My problem is when people start using cognitive crutches such as LESS and SASS, which bloat the CSS immensely with insanely redundant styling. I once took a generated CSS file from a “professional” and cut it down from over 500kb to less than 180Kb with zero loss of functionality or presentation. One HTML widget had separate - and absolutely identical - CSS for each and every single one of the 25+ pages it was present on. That was 250+ lines of CSS, instantly evaporated by consolidating down to one common class and two special cases that had extra stuff. Which is insane.
I disagree with many of the comments here. CSS is not too complicated. It's a good way to style HTML elements.
There are some popular abstractions to writing CSS such as Tailwind. Although I do see it misguiding a lot of people. When you don't know CSS but want a webpage, use a template instead. If you want deep custom styling you will need to understand CSS. Tailwind is just a collection of predefined utility classes which you then over use, breaking a few clean code principles along the way, but you get a decent looking website without writing all the utility classes yourself, which can be helpful especially in larger team projects.
There are improvements to this problem such as DaisyUI.
But regardless, they do require some understanding of CSS. And if you do understand some CSS, getting to the next level and learning how to write scalable CSS is not much harder. The simple requirement of having global and scoped styling is a given in every modern framework.
This is partly what led me to create a guide on writing modern scalable HTML and CSS: https://webdev.bryanhogan.com/
- Tailwind (wow, the website is laggy): https://tailwindcss.com/
- DaisyUI: https://daisyui.com/
- Some modern framework, e.g. Astro: https://astro.build/