[danShumway]

Does it matter if it does compile down to that?

A lot of abstractions are complicated under the hood -- the high-level graphics formats that are used in engines are under the hood doing a ton of complicated tradeoffs and tricks to try and get the same sprites to render on Metal, Vulkan, OpenGL, and DirectX.

I tend to avoid over-abstraction when I can, but I still have to ask -- it a problem that those abstractions are complicated under the hood if they work for the developers that use them? Pipewire is pretty complicated under the hood to maintain compatibility with multiple setups; does that mean we can't have a universal audio interface for Linux and every device should be programming separately for ALSA and PulseAudio?

[taeric]

Fair that I don't think "what it compiles to" should be near as important as I was holding it.

CSS, though, did have a goal at the start to be a lot more approachable than what we have, though. User stylesheets were a huge selling point in early pitches that I recall. That is flat not possible with how we have things nowadays.

And I also think it would be fair to lay a lot of the blame on just how many divs so many designs explode things into.

[danShumway]

I mean... I do agree with this:

> And I also think it would be fair to lay a lot of the blame on just how many divs so many designs explode things into.

That could be a longer conversation but what I try to get across to designers is that the DOM is your interface, the DOM is not the tool you use to build your interface, the DOM should be a user-facing representation of application state, and incidentally you can also represent that visually.

So agreed, I hate it when I open dev tools and I just some completely incomprehensible mountain of divs.

That being said:

> That is flat not possible with how we have things nowadays.

I do this. I maintain custom stylesheets for websites I visit, it's very possible. It's one of the things I love about the web, I love that I can have website-specific stylesheets in Firefox without even installing an addon. I've set up hacks when I was trying to use the browser less to do grayscale effects across websites I didn't want to visit. It was a tiny amount of code and it mostly just worked, and I really couldn't do something equivalent with other platforms.

And OK, sure, maybe that's just me and it's unfair for me to say it's easy. I work with CSS a lot, I am generally proficient at it. So that's maybe a bad standard for me to have -- what about the people who don't want to work with CSS a ton until they understand it?

Well... do they use uBlock Origin? There are a host of browser extensions that modify stylesheets on the fly to do complicated things that help make the web better. uBlock Origin would be a lot worse without CSS. And there's an on-ramp for that kind of thing too, HN has honestly a pretty bad user-interface as far as the DOM is concerned. But I have a number of one-line filters in uBlock that are basically just CSS rules that help make the website better.

It's not perfect and it should be better, but I'm left looking at the alternatives again -- no other platform gives me as much control over 3rd-party user interfaces as the web. And for the most part it just works, websites like Facebook are the exception and very often, particularly for indie websites, I can open up the DOM and mess with things and fix problems.

It's a problem that it's not more accessible and I am not shaming anyone who struggles with it, but I don't think it's impossible. It's a normal thing for me to do. Maybe I'm biased on that, but I think it's very feasible for especially programmers to learn to override 3rd-party interfaces on the web.

My main critique of the web is that there should be more abstractions for non-programmers and UI designers to work with that doesn't require them to drop into a programming language when overriding things. Reader Mode for Firefox is a step in the right direction, although it could be a lot better. The browser controls for font sizes are good. There's a lot further that browsers could go to improve that situation.

[taeric]

Totally fair that my statement is too strong there. I'm not going for a legal offensive here. :D