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by farleykr 838 days ago
I've found the best way is to build things over and over again. That may reflect a certain learning style but actually manipulating styles and layouts really helps hammer home the practical aspects of how it works.

I also approach writing CSS with the goal of writing as little as possible. Not because I don't like it - I tend to think it gets an unfairly bad rap - but because it teaches you how to more effectively style layouts without layering too many declarations.
1 comments
lesser_value 838 days ago
I feel like this type of thinking is why 99% of people don't understands css though, when you are just building things you make up rules that don't exist and ignore the ones that do. And its not as straight forward as programming languages are so its very hard to tell when something is "wrong".
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farleykr 838 days ago
Yeah, maybe my suggestion could've been better stated. I'm not suggesting that you can ignore documentation and other forms of writing that explore paradigms and methodologies. I meant there's only so much you can read before actually writing CSS and practicing making layouts becomes a necessary part of learning CSS in depth.

And, to play devil's advocate a little: You can't make up a rule that doesn't exist. Either your CSS will work or it won't. And if it works it's not wrong.

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chrisfinazzo 838 days ago
> You can't make up a rule that doesn't exist. Either your CSS will work or it won't. And if it works it's not wrong.

So much this. Over the course of years, I've gone from writing my CV in Word, TeX, and (finally) straight HTML. Word processors are fairly straightforward -- and yet -- for more complex layouts you will eventually encounter internal sizing constraints that require messing with the global template.

This reality - combined with the fact that MS Office is a gigantic monster which is barely tolerable on macOS, led me to TeX. Plaintext -- more or less -- and good support for integrating with version control systems made it an easy choice.

Fast forward a few years and I'm all HTML + a handful of CSS rules w/ @print at this point. Cryptic error messages and the care and feeding of a BasicTex install just became too much work to bother with. At least in HTML, save for a showstopping error, your document will render something and the errors are usually pretty obvious.

Not so much in TeX...

Modern layout also meant I could ditch floats for nearly everything - flexbox will create reasonable page headers with much less gnashing of teeth.

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