[ericwood]

CSS suffers from one of its original design tenants in that it's very easy to throw some shit at the wall and kind of get it working without fully understanding it. This is especially true for people who have dabbled in it from time to time in their career when absolutely needed. It's rare to see someone sit down and learn it from first principles. It doesn't take long and knowing the basic theory goes a long ways!

[antod]

I agree. I taught myself CSS1 by reading the spec (it was limited, small and simple). CSS2 was a lot bigger and way more complex but Eric Meyer's Salmon book helped a lot.

One problem (20yrs ago at least) was that for a long time the specs weren't supported very well by common browsers. So everyone just prodded at hacks using trial and error instead of learning it. That approach never really went away even after support improved.

[dotancohen]

  > So everyone just prodded at hacks using trial and error instead of learning it.

And that is exactly why all those frameworks started appearing. It wasn't developer laziness. It was developer sanity.

[jgalt212]

> CSS suffers from one of its original design tenants in that it's very easy to throw some shit at the wall and kind of get it working without fully understanding it

And dev tools made this feedback loop much faster.