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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: 0.254s | source
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b_e_n_t_o_n ◴[29 Aug 25 04:20 UTC] No.45060146[source]▶
I really do appreciate the nesting they've added but looking at it as a whole, CSS is a really strange and in my humble opinion, a terrible language. Perhaps I'm just holding it wrong, but it's just so complicated and messy, it sometimes feels like you're just arranging arcane runes in different ways until you make it sort of work for you. It's both a system for styling text based on inheritance, and a layout system for block and inline elements, nested recursively but without inheritance, only containment. I think it was a mistake to combine styling and layout, and I don't feel like adding more and more capabilities to something fundamentally broken can fix it.
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1. exodust ◴[29 Aug 25 08:22 UTC] No.45061557[source]▶
> "I think it was a mistake to combine styling and layout"

Perhaps because we can have different styles of layout, it fits with CSS better than you say. Carefully designed padding, margins and negative space is both a style and layout consideration.

Containers contain styles, but the container's relationship with other containers may tie with presentation such as border thickness, colour, shadows, and let's not forget animation and interaction effects on containers. Maintaining control of these aspects in one place makes good sense to me.