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by tombert 458 days ago
I never got very good with CSS or HTML styling. I know enough to generally fix obvious stuff, but I'm kind of a luddite and still use Bootstrap for most of my stuff. I've mostly stopped doing web stuff, so the only time I touch CSS is when I'm doing an admin screen or something, so it doesn't have to look great.

Still, a part of me wonders how different my life would be if I had taken to frontend programming enough to make things that look nice. It's not like there isn't anything enjoyable about it, I just ended up taking to backend distributed systems work a bit sooner.
2 comments
kyleyeats 458 days ago
The predecessor to this project was a Bootstrap 3 theme: https://rriepe.github.io/1pxdeep/

The book has a lot of content over what to make pretty and what not to make pretty. I think knowing what not to bother with is an underrated skill. A lot of what inspired me to write it was backenders handing off markup that they tried to make semi-passable. Unstyled HTML, please!

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hinkley 458 days ago
I did for a while when CSS3 was new.

Big problem with evergreen standards: if you try to come back to a standard that is now twice as big but still has the same version number, there is nobody writing books to teach you what you missed out on. Want to come from CSS2 to 3? They got you. Want to do backend development for five years and then get a summary on what you missed? Go fuck yourself.

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tombert 458 days ago
Yeah, that's the thing.

I'm not saying that this is a "bad" thing, but the last time I did any significant amount of frontend stuff was back in ~2014, and it was AngularJS, which was considered pretty ok at the time I think. I left that job and started doing almost exclusively backend stuff for several years, and when I looked back, the entire world had switched to React and transpiling JSX and a lot more CSS than I was familiar with.

It seemed pretty intimidating to try and pick that up again, so I never really left the backend stuff, and now I've managed to even avoid web stuff for awhile, because I kind of hate web programming.

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hinkley 458 days ago
Today's example:

Forgot that you can nest CSS now without Less or SCSS. Luckily my CSS has just barely tipped over into 'hot garbage' when I figured this out instead of in another four weeks.

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DicIfTEx 457 days ago
FWIW you're not alone in thinking that: there's a W3C CSS4 Community Group[0] now, and you can find more detail on their proposal at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4770 and ongoing CSS[3|4|5|Next] categorisation work at https://css-levels.netlify.app/

[0]: https://www.w3.org/community/css4/

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