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Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with

(lyra.horse)
451 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 28 Aug 25 20:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.24s | source
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mannyv ◴[29 Aug 25 01:57 UTC] No.45059180[source]▶
Ugh, the syntax for CSS is just so crappy.

I know like 10-15 different languages, and CSS is by far the hardest to read and understand. It's easier to understand x86 assembly than CSS. CSS is basically pre-tokenized input that drives a renderer, but they sort of went halfway and didn't really make it real tokens or really human-writable.

I'd say that it should take the place of ASN.1 in the RFCs as an example of "what not to do."

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1. ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 ◴[29 Aug 25 02:19 UTC] No.45059328[source]▶
> I know like 10-15 different languages, and CSS is by far the hardest to read and understand.

CSS is hard to know, even if you know 15 languages.

I can understand many programming languages and write in a subset of many of their features, but I wouldn't claim to know them. That would require a monumental amount of day to day effort, in my opinion (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth).

To me, the best way to understand CSS is to evaluate it after rendering, and I have been writing it for decades.