[karaterobot]

It's getting more powerful than ever, and it's easier to do things that used to be hard (vertically centering, etc.), but it's also got a lot more capabilities that have a learning curve (custom properties, color functions, container queries, etc.).

I've been writing CSS since 1997, and I remember having to use invalid characters to fork CSS in the days of IE 6, and all the old school hacks involving floats, full-height content, etc. CSS in that era was hard, but it was hard in the sense of "there's stuff we just can't do in the browser, so let's design around that". Nowadays, it's hard in a different way, which is "oh, I guess there's an entire new hoard of CSS capabilities I've literally never heard of before, and I need to spend some time wrapping my brain around it, so I can add it to the massive and ever-growing pile of CSS things I need to know".

[JohnTHaller]

> I remember having to use invalid characters to fork CSS in the days of IE 6

I just twitched a bit reading that

[kibibu]

There were differences between IE on Windows, IE for Mac (which had an entirely different engine), Netscape, Gecko, and Safari.

If you needed to work around them, you could either sniff user agents, or abuse parsing inconsistencies to hide rules from each.

[JohnTHaller]

I used the parser inconsistencies myself. I created the first web app template that worked in IE 3/4 and Netscape 3/4 for a Fortune 500 back in the day.