←back to thread

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: 0.241s | source
Show context
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.
replies(11): >>45060383 #>>45060483 #>>45060957 #>>45061557 #>>45061852 #>>45062092 #>>45062151 #>>45062384 #>>45063859 #>>45067840 #>>45069507 #
1. DanielHB ◴[29 Aug 25 13:29 UTC] No.45063859[source]▶
The problem with CSS is the C: Cascading. Which is what you are calling "inheritance"

Cascading is a nice feature for documents, that present data in the same way over and over. It not good for anything interactive. A lot of modern styling techniques are all about making CSS _not_ cascade. UI components (which is the majority of modern frontend dev) is basically a pre-requisite to achieve that.

The layout system is a bit of a separate discussion, and it is a mess yes, but mostly for backwards compatibility. If we could live in a world where all layout is default flexbox or grid and never mix inline with non-inline in the same container it would work out just fine. In fact that is _exactly_ how it works in React Native and it doesn't cause problems there. Styling in React Native also doesn't cascade which also makes it a lot easier to manage.