You don’t need fancy software to write. You also don’t need a £1k+ camera to take photos, the latest console to play video games, or a certificate to learn something.
I’ve seen artists use Microsoft Paint to create amazing pictures. It goes to show you don’t need fancy tools to do great things. If you’re trying something new, start with the basics and go from there.
The question of whether CSS is a programming language serves only one purpose: to demote those who write it.
There is no confusion that needs to be clarified, and no other purpose in asking, beyond the most trivial kind of pedantry.
The debate itself is an act of gatekeeping, whether intentional or not. Its only significant effect is to elevate some work over other work, despite their essentially identical nature.
The only meaningful function of the question is segregation.
I really don’t get the whole “CSS isn’t a programming language” crowd. I see what other developers can do with CSS and am amazed. It’s something I’ve been consistently trying to improve on. The gatekeeping stuff is just BS.
It took no time at all to master Garfield, but when I started getting Calvin and Hobbes, I knew I was making progress; even when I didn’t understand the words, I could still marvel at the sheer exuberance and detail of the art.
I still read Calvin & Hobbes and I’m amazed at how much more I still get out of the strips. Bits and pieces of humor, insights into life, and more still permeate the strips.
There was always the running joke with how to center content. Then it became easier with CSS grid and flexbox. Now you don’t even need that.
With align-content available for block layout, you can achieve vertical alignment without needing to create a flex or grid layout for the property to work. No additional properties are needed as the item remains a block item, the only change is to the alignment.
Reporting on Trump has been giving the media fits since he first started his presidential run in 2015. The editor for The Cleveland Plain Dealer writes about what should be obvious.
The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.
This is what journalism is supposed to be. The truth regardless of what it is.
This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.
The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.
I wish more of the news media was willing to ditch the false equivalency of Trump and the GOP and focus more on the truth regardless of who it might upset.
But despite all these claims, CSS is also somehow “not a real programming language.” Many people online will tell you so, often quite loudly, and sometimes even using memes. Same with HTML.
Sadly I understand where Josh is coming from.
Becoming better with CSS is something I really want to do. I want to improve my skills there and slowly I think I am.
Shame on anyone who thinks that creating amazing, beautiful, and accessible layouts with HTML & CSS is “easy” or should be devalued.
People keep saying “but they do the same to us.” That’s no excuse. We shouldn’t take a page from the Chinese censorship playbook and basically give them the moral high ground, combined with the ability to point to this move as justification for the shenanigans they’ve pulled in banning US companies from China.
If we’re doing what China is with regards to censorship, we’ve failed. This whole thing reeks of bad reasoning, and curtailing people’s speech.
Public sentiment in the US regarding China is reaching record lows, with the vast majority of Americans reasonably concerned about China’s role in the world. So if China is using TikTok to propagandize to Americans, it’s doing a shitty job of it.
Yup...
It's the getting people to understand the organizational changes needed to address them that is the hard part. It's a lot of time convincing people of things that have been documented for years. It's a lot of time spent educating people on things you learned 1, 5, 10 year(s) ago
I’ve been working on a new project at work and thankfully the team is on board in making sure it’s accessible. But I’ve been on the other side of it as well. It can be hard to make people recognize the extra work to ensure accessibility is both necessary and the right thing to do.
And I’ll also admit that I haven’t always put accessibility where it needs to be and have in the past skipped out on it. I’ve been trying to make sure that’s no longer the case.
But banning TikTok, while refusing to pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers (which traffic in significantly greater volumes of sensitive data at much greater collective scale), winds up mostly being a performative endeavor driven more by anti-competitive intent (and a desire to control the flow and scope of modern news, information and propaganda) than any desire for serious reform.
I don’t use TikTok, I don’t have an account nor, do I intend on ever creating one. But if China wants to get info on all of us, they don’t need TikTok. They can just go to a random data broker and slurp up what they have on all of us. And best of all, that’s pretty much completely legal. They can get more data than TikTok (probably) has and we’re still screwed.
But even lawmakers who sincerely believe that banning TikTok makes meaningful inroads on national security or consumer privacy generally don’t seem to understand the size and scope of the problem we’re dealing with.
That’s unfortunately so often the case in many fields when it comes to technology (and more).
Utility-first detractors complain a lot about how verbose this is and, consequently, how ugly. And it is indeed. But you’d forgive it that if it actually solved a problem, which it doesn’t. It is unequivocally an inferior way of making things which _are_alike look alike, as you should. It is and can only be useful for reproducing inconsistent design, wherein all those repeated values would instead differ.
I've certainly built some utility classes is CSS and I believe they certainly have a place. Using them for the just about everything is not my preferred way of doing things and would recommend against it.
It turns out, people in tech are particularly bad at distinguishing between paradigm shifts and paradigm sharts. That’s why we have nose-diving cryptocurrencies, dust-collecting monkey JPEG portfolios, and AI-generated children’s books teaching kids about pink, two-headed dinosaurs that never existed.
Truer words have never been spoken.
These are mostly my thoughts about what I was expecting as a junior and how I perceived senior developers. To be honest, I was romanticizing them quite a bit — senior developers were the people who could solve all the problems, constantly told me what to do, and knew all the answers.
I wish I had all the answers, that would make my life so much easier. 17 years in the work force and I'm learning something new every day.
I don’t like the fact that libraries like React are so heavily used, but over the years, I’ve grown more empathetic about the decision by teams to use them. The web platform doesn’t currently give us all the tools we might need, but I’m hopeful it will in the longer term. I also get that people can’t wait for that and need to get moving, so libraries service their needs better than the web platform currently does.
Definitely agree here. For bigger & more complicated projects, libraries can provide a lot of help to get it off the ground quickly. Necessary, no, but from a practical perspective I get it. Managers and higher ups don't necessarily always care about what is best, they care about the bottom line and having something to ship.
All I would say is finding the lowest-tech solution and leaning into browser capabilities as much as possible is a good way to build something resilient and reliable.
Completely agree, if you can avoid over-complicating your builds with libraries and sticking with HTML & CSS, go for it.