CSS must be fun to use nowadays, with tons of flexibility and great browser support. I remember the days when you couldn't even rely on CSS2 because IE6 didn't support it, apart from having serious rendering bugs.
Once CSS gets nesting [1] natively (ie, not having to use SCSS or Postcss) the total sum of improvements it will be 100x less annoying vs the early 2000s. Variables, grids, flex, container/media queries, math functions, clamp [2] etc make life so much easier.
The last thing is mixins/functions, but not sure if there's an RFC for that.
CSS had always been fun. It’s always a puzzle, trying to take advantage of the way all the rules contribute to the final layout. I think people get frustrated with it because they don’t want to mess with it, they just want it to work - that’s where a lot of those css layout frameworks come from, that’s where BEM comes from - people just don’t want to mess with it. But for me, I’ve always thought messing with it was the fun part.
I've been a web designer since 1993. It was nice in 1993 because you didn't even have a background color. The color of your page was the default color of the window on your OS. Usually grey.
Then we went through 25 years of dark ages where there were plenty of really great ideas for layout which were completely lost to horrible and competing and half-assed executions.
We are now finally in the golden age of layout where I can make something that looks great on all displays if I have the time and talent to do it. Sadly that is in short supply.
I think we have Chrome to thank for modern web design. Once the browser competition was completely and utterly crushed and everyone was forced to sign on to The One True Layout Engine the benevolent dictators at Google set things on the right path.
There are still edges cases (which JPEG replacement will win?!), but they are now blessedly few and far between.
> I think we have Chrome to thank for modern web design.
I think it's less the dominance of Chrome itself and more the demise of Internet Explorer. The problem was that it didn't get updated like normal software, it was somehow tied to the OS, so old outdated versions lingered around for far too long, limiting what technologies web developers could use.
> There are still edges cases (which JPEG replacement will win?!), but they are now blessedly few and far between.
Last I heard was that the Benevolent Dictators at Google decided that AVIF shall win.
>The problem was that it didn't get updated like normal software, it was somehow tied to the OS, so old outdated versions lingered around for far too long, limiting what technologies web developers could use.
Now that mantle is taken up by Safari, especially on mobile.
They're a bit more separated on macOS but still not really separate. On iOS, it's very much tied to the iOS/iPad OS version.
There's perfectly functional iPads out there that are stuck on an iOS version and are thus e-waste as more and more Internet becomes inaccessible to them.
It's AWESOME!!! IE died! Bloated frameworks have become irrelevant! No more modernizers. You can just use it the way it's supposed to be used.
And let me take the opportunity to diss the failure that is mixing your styles into your layout with Tailwind and it's endless and illegible bloat of unreadable html.
And let me take the opportunity to diss the failure that is mixing your styles into your layout with Tailwind and it's endless and illegible bloat of unreadable html.
Reading the bloated HTML is less painful than dealing with all the cascading crap.
Lol. I certainly know many people feel that way, otherwise Tailwind wouldn't exist. But I'm a strict adherent to the concept that you keep your languages separate. You should not have to wonder whether you need to go to your html or css file to change the appearance of a site.
