I wish there was a comprehensive resource for CSS. I’ve known for a very long time that I don’t know the half of it. But randomly clicking through the MDN topics has a very [Edit: low high] cost to benefit ratio. Where do you learn about the gems of CSS without getting bogged down by the obscure topics like text-emphasis-style?

:root {
  color-scheme: light dark;
  --text: light-dark(#000, #FFF);
  --bg: light-dark(#EEE, #242936);
}

Hmm, I guess the advantage of that over

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    /*set different values for variables*/
}

is that you can set the color scheme via a button much more easily then.

Had to think about that for a moment, because the old way of doing things seemed fine, but that is a pretty good reason, I guess.

• you've never needed javascript

I bookmarked another post from this community that might relate nicely!
It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA

Haven't gotten to trying all the cool css stuff in my own projects yet, but it certainly sounds interesting :D

I believe a lot of the negativity towards CSS stems from not really knowing how to use it. Many developers kind of just skip learning the CSS fundamentals in favor of the more interesting Java- and TypeScript, and then go on to complain about a styling language they don’t understand.

My negativity towards CSS is that it was made by people who used to style newspapers and the terminology plus way of thinking was just copy-pasted to the digital world where things aren't the same. For example, the display property has so many values that I don't understand... same goes for position and a bunch of other properties and how they interact. Sometimes setting one property can completely invalidate another one. position, display and width or height are examples of that.

The major problem with CSS is that it's a language which requires a lot of memorisation, not understanding. Unlike programming languages where you can reason why things have to be written a certain way from a point of understanding, with CSS the why is often "because it worked that way when I tried it".

To understand why certain things work or don't in CSS, you have to understand typesettings,maybe color theory, browser history, and a bunch of other things. It's not a surprise that most people memorise CSS stuff.

I compare it to our current school system: it's very good for people who can/enjoy memorizing things (at least until the test). For those who care more or are better at understanding and reasoning, it is hell. CSS is like our school system.

Anti Commercial-AI license

That’s great and wonderful, except some of those things don’t work on an iPhone. As long as Apple is holding back the industry, we’ll have to use JS for some things.

with so many wasm frameworks you can use any language you like

"But CSS sucks”

I believe a lot of the negativity towards CSS stems from not really knowing how to use it. Many developers kind of just skip learning the CSS fundamentals in favor of the more interesting Java- and TypeScript, and then go on to complain about a styling language they don’t understand.

True. I did a HTML+CSS-only gallery when CSS3 just came out. And was positively surprised a few days ago, that a online gallery viewer had a shareable URL per picture (GET request).

While JS forms should just die. They always lose the content on reload or failed send (because of brittle client-side JS send, instead of using age-old browser-features).

Sadly the linked example doesn’t seem to work on ios.

Personally I like using server side rendering when I can. The UI should be as light weight as possible and you can do a lot with just HTML and CSS. That said, it's pretty hard to build a responsive web app without at least a little bit of JavaScript.

I feel JavaScript should be more of a backend scripting language, like with Node, than a frontend. PHP can already accomplish a lot of what JS can do, just on the server-side as opposed to client-side.

PHP+CSS is really all you need to make something feel good. People often use JS to make a site look good, yet it usually suffers in functionality.