Nothing is above a little healthy criticism.
Here’s Den Odell’s article We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem.
It’s easy to forget what CSS was originally designed for: documents. You’d write some HTML, style a few headings and paragraphs, maybe float an image to the left, and call it a day. In that world, global styles made sense. The cascade was helpful. Inheritance was elegant.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and we’re building highly interactive, component-based, state-driven, design-system-heavy applications, still with a language meant to style a résumé in the early 2000s.
CSS wasn’t built for encapsulated components. It wasn’t built for dynamic theming or runtime configuration or hydration mismatches. So we’ve spent years bolting on strategies to make it work.
If I can critique the critique, it makes some good and astute points, but pitting CSS evolution as the enemy up front doesn’t sit right. CSS itself, in my opinion, is doing great. It’s not the job of CSS to chase trends or bend toward fickle developer tooling trends. To be fair, Den also says it’s not really the fault of CSS, it’s a matter of choosing trade-offs with your eyes open, which I fully agree with.
Jono Alderson isn’t pleased, really, with modern web development entirely. I’ll quote some of his intro:
Most websites are awful.
Not just slow – awful. Bloated, fragile, over-engineered disasters. They load slowly, render erratically, and hide their content behind megabytes of JavaScript. They glitch on mobile. They frustrate users and confuse search engines. They’re impossible to maintain. And somehow, we’re calling this progress. […]
This isn’t evolution. It’s self-inflicted complexity. And we’ve normalised it – because somewhere along the way, we started building websites for developers, not for users.
Go look around at “modern” media-driven sites and you’ll see he’s not wrong. We all see it every day. It’s almost embarrassing these days to tell people you make websites, because everybody knows websites are pretty rough these days.
If I can, again, critique the critique, it’s that nobody (you, me, Jono) need to do this. The web isn’t forcing us to do this. The web is amazingly backward compatible. If you are nostalgic for some way of building websites gone by, well, just start doing it that way again, because it will still work. Jono does mention this, but misses naming the real enemy: the companies themselves that put up with this and hire specifically to enforce it. I can and do say you don’t need to build websites with the latest in JavaScript cargo-culting, but in order to get a decent paying job in web development, well, you just might have to. That’s the real shame here. Yes this is a problem, and we’re not going to fix it unless companies start writing checks to employees to remove cruft and remove complexity and give freedom to developers who care to improve the situation.
For a random little bonus… ain’t it a shame the lack of love for sin() and cos() in CSS? Most hated?! Jeepers.