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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: 0.339s | 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. marcelr ◴[29 Aug 25 21:18 UTC] No.45069507[source]▶
i think css is one of the most brilliant languages

but you have to separate the specific properties (float) and the semantics of the language

the selector system is incredible, in a way i can’t quite describe why but it feels similar to programming in prolog

inheritance is kind of stupid for most things yes, but `all: initial` is a easy fix / debug

to me the part i love is the debugger (dev tools) and the ability to plop down code where ever and it just works, code organization is just writing good selectors

unfortunately i don’t get to do this professionally so the largest css files i work with are 1000 lines, and usually no shared libs, but i find it extremely fun to work with