You suck at CSS and that's okay (2022)

The argument I make in the book is that the last 5% of CSS/design should be written by people who can write CSS. Nobody else should even be writing CSS because it turns into a huge mess when everyone jumps in.

I mothballed this project because people were so incredibly cruel about it (a CSS project!). Remember that people who work on this stuff are people, and we're just trying to make things better. Also, you can pry .vertical-center from my cold, dead hands.

Organic growth leads to vestigial warts - that is the price of success and development. I'm really impressed with so much of CSS and what can be achieved with what it has become.

> My view is that those who designed CSS suck

I think that is a stink attitude because there is no need to malign people. Don't be a dick. Most successful things "suck" because it is easy to feel the compromises when you use something. It is incredible hard to see the warts before we build, and even harder to find consensus solutions. All too often I hear whingers, that lack the ability to deliver working solutions, who are often unrealistically idealistic and too quick to poopoo the work of others. They are the people with second-system syndrome - who often deliver a version 2.0 using technology B and get an outcome all too often far worse than v1.0.

LLMs are great for building frontends for backend projects and backends for frontend projects

I agree. CASS (the library this book was promoting) is actually really great paired with LLMs. If I revisit this project, it'll be along the lines of using it with LLMs.

I tried to use a framework on a web project recently, but looking at the two most popular frameworks... one of the results in every site looking the same, while the other is a step backwards to the bad old days in the worst possible ways. It was simpler to start from scratch, and I finally understood the cascade. I was actually able to drop most of the explicit class attributes, which led to a significant reduction in page size.

The primary purpose of frameworks was to work around the quirks in all the different web browsers out there, and to implement grid-like layouts before we had css grid, and to deal with the impossibility of centering a div natively. None of that is necessary these days, and hasn't been for a decade.

One reason I think Tailwind became so popular is that it makes it much easier to pattern match CSS. I don't think it's a good or bad thing, it's just a thing.

The predecessor to this project was a Bootstrap 3 theme: https://rriepe.github.io/1pxdeep/

The book has a lot of content over what to make pretty and what not to make pretty. I think knowing what not to bother with is an underrated skill. A lot of what inspired me to write it was backenders handing off markup that they tried to make semi-passable. Unstyled HTML, please!

I did for a while when CSS3 was new.

Big problem with evergreen standards: if you try to come back to a standard that is now twice as big but still has the same version number, there is nobody writing books to teach you what you missed out on. Want to come from CSS2 to 3? They got you. Want to do backend development for five years and then get a summary on what you missed? Go fuck yourself.

It looks great, specifically for me. I can't comment on anyone else, but I have to imagine it's dysfunctional. I abstracted as many color and style options as possible to allow for a lot of variable-setting. I unreservedly apologize for the affront to common decency (but I'm probably still gonna use it). Gotta have that transparent glass effect on ma' netstats.

I wrote a similar comment yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43316939.

CSS styling used to take me forever, now I basically just tell AI the contours of what I want, and it gives me the vast majority of what I want. It often has some bugs, and I always need to edit/tweak it to get things right, but it probably saves me 90% of the time I used to waste on CSS (I'm primarily a backend dev).

It's true. Between atomic CSS libraries and LLMs, there's almost no reason to write CSS nowadays.

Not even pixel perfection but also coming up with UX ideas by people who don’t understand technical details.

Like QA not passing some detail because they think it should be different. Where in reality it is what it is because of framework etc.

Yes you mostly can do everything - but not everything is worth spending time/money on.

The perfection should be downstream of the project's coded standards, not downstream of the faithful implementation of the designer's work. Some designers are really good about maintaining standards-- but the book would argue all that effort should be spent elsewhere.

It's basically "the arbitrary padding the designer liked in the moment" vs. "the standard padding that's everywhere in the project." This book argues you should always use the standard padding. Your product should be pixel-perfect, just not in the PSD-to-HTML sense.

It's amazing how much the initial intent of the web has been perverted. Not all for the worse, but still.

Edited the year into the title. CASS (the CSS library) and YSAC (this book) have been a huge marketing mess, to be honest. And yeah the substack was part of it-- I think the book came first though. Kyle Yeats (rhymes with stylesheets) was going to be a Youtube persona but I could never really get the feel of it right.

The book morphed into being more about project management. I think there's a lot of value in it still, in that respect, so I'm putting it all online for free.