People really didn't know this? To be clear, I'm not criticizing anyone for not knowing this stuff, as nobody can be expected to know everything (and everyone was a beginner at one time). I'm just surprised that within this community, where a lot of us are employed to build websites, that the basics of CSS are still a mystery to so many of us. And I don't think that's the fault of any individual. But clearly our industry has a problem.
Granted, if you spend most of your time on the backend, and only dabble in CSS a little bit, or you're new to web development, it's completely understandable to be fuzzy on the specifics of CSS. But that doesn't explain all the comments from designers and front end people. So what's going on?
One possibility is that CSS is too difficult. Maybe? It certainly has it's flaws. And it was harder to use in the past. But I don't think there's a huge learning curve to understanding the difference between padding and margin, or between block and inline elements, is there? Don't we do that sort of thing in Word documents regularly?
Another possibility, then, is that the mental model of a document doesn't match the designer's expectations. But I don't think this alone explains why so many of us struggle with CSS. It's true that many of us are trying to make applications on a platform meant for documents. It's also true that magazine-style page layouts aren't a natural fit for a Word-like model of document editing. But the features described in this article don't seem related to that discrepancy - I can't see how ignorance about nth child or rem units relates to the mental model of documents.
Here's what I think is happening: We spend too much time building new tools and not enough time learning the tools we have. I've seen this with javascript as well. There were some recent posts here about vanilla javascript, and comments from React developers were surprised by some of the things JS could do on it's own. Now React has it's place of course, just like how CSS frameworks have their place. But I see a lot of people using these things as a boilerplate, instead of using them where appropriate. And thus, we don't take the time to learn how to do stuff with just HTML, CSS, and JS.
And granted, I don't think everyone needs to know that, just like how not everyone needs to know assembly. But if not enough people understand what's going underneath the hood, then the default response to any limitation is "abstract more" and everything grows more and more bloated.
I'm not sure how we solve this. I suspect the time pressures of our industries incentivize building things quickly, which leads to this problem. Another possibility is that the browsers take too long to adopt new standards, which leads people to seek out workarounds.
Has anyone here thought about this? Any ideas on what we should do?
I think the linked article is a good start. The explanations of CSS properties is very clear, and I like the examples.
I think the industry has an attitude problem towards the front end stack. HTML and CSS is not what programmers do. Nobody takes the time to learn it, everybody neglects it, managers hand it over to their newest junior developer, project managers are happy as long as it looks shiny, bootcamps don’t teach it properly, curriculums don’t teach it properly. In the end we have a bunch of people that don’t know anything about the craft, that accept poor craftsmanship as an industry standard.
I had a conversation about this with my partner—who is a woodworker—this morning after reading this thread. I explained my perception of the status of front-end within our industry as such:
It’s as if woodworking and carpentry were synonymous. There are woodworkers that do cabinetry, but all of them learned carpentry. At most they took a single course on cabinetry, but that course probably used outdated methods, tools designed for carpentry, and the teacher them self has build a couple of chairs and a few tables in the past. Most of the people new to the field of cabinetry would come for bootcamps that last for maybe a month where they had to learn woodworking from scratch. Good furniture makers are only expected to be good at woodworking in general. Master carpenters are often expected to be able to finish—or at least manage—furniture projects at their job.
You can imagine the sloppy craftsmanship you would see in the furniture building industry if that were the case. And yet, as tech workers, here we are.
Granted, if you spend most of your time on the backend, and only dabble in CSS a little bit, or you're new to web development, it's completely understandable to be fuzzy on the specifics of CSS. But that doesn't explain all the comments from designers and front end people. So what's going on?
One possibility is that CSS is too difficult. Maybe? It certainly has it's flaws. And it was harder to use in the past. But I don't think there's a huge learning curve to understanding the difference between padding and margin, or between block and inline elements, is there? Don't we do that sort of thing in Word documents regularly?
Another possibility, then, is that the mental model of a document doesn't match the designer's expectations. But I don't think this alone explains why so many of us struggle with CSS. It's true that many of us are trying to make applications on a platform meant for documents. It's also true that magazine-style page layouts aren't a natural fit for a Word-like model of document editing. But the features described in this article don't seem related to that discrepancy - I can't see how ignorance about nth child or rem units relates to the mental model of documents.
Here's what I think is happening: We spend too much time building new tools and not enough time learning the tools we have. I've seen this with javascript as well. There were some recent posts here about vanilla javascript, and comments from React developers were surprised by some of the things JS could do on it's own. Now React has it's place of course, just like how CSS frameworks have their place. But I see a lot of people using these things as a boilerplate, instead of using them where appropriate. And thus, we don't take the time to learn how to do stuff with just HTML, CSS, and JS.
And granted, I don't think everyone needs to know that, just like how not everyone needs to know assembly. But if not enough people understand what's going underneath the hood, then the default response to any limitation is "abstract more" and everything grows more and more bloated.
I'm not sure how we solve this. I suspect the time pressures of our industries incentivize building things quickly, which leads to this problem. Another possibility is that the browsers take too long to adopt new standards, which leads people to seek out workarounds.
Has anyone here thought about this? Any ideas on what we should do? I think the linked article is a good start. The explanations of CSS properties is very clear, and I like the examples.