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by lumpypua 4321 days ago
If you don't know what technical debt is... If you hate making changes in your code, then you have it. If changes are hard to make, then you have it.

I just spent the past 4 hours making a breadcrumb layout in CSS. I hate making changes to fancy layout CSS. Does that mean the CSS language itself is technical debt? :P

(Yes, I know about and heavily abuse less/sass and associated libraries.)
2 comments
ionelm 4320 days ago
I don't think many people would disagree that CSS/HTML have certain encapsulation deficiencies. But I think that less/sass just make you more efficient at writing unmaintainable stuff.

Shadow DOM and WebComponents solve this better by encapsulating styling and markup concerned with the same widget or object. Without those you still have styling concerned with different markup in the same place. You can use less/sass but it's not true encapsulation - you still have to pay attention that you don't break styling for unrelated stuff when changing styling. Thus the "unwanted pain".

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lumpypua 4320 days ago
shrug I've gotten good at avoiding encapsulation problems by blowing my architectural foot off with css preprocessors a couple of times. :) I still don't have a clear system, but I've learned the how to decompose a layout over time in ways that let me reuse effectively. Usually this is by extracting emergent structure as soon as the css starts to look like a tangle. Once done, it's more clear where to throw it or fold into existing stuff.

I've been loving React for the past 6 months, but yeah Shadow DOM and WebComponents have exactly the right idea WRT encapsulation.

My main CSS gripe is purely layout. I want to do relatively simple things like make responsive multi-column layouts using relative widths where one of the columns is fixed. Turns out that's hard and needs javascript. Flexbox is a huge step forward for making interesting layouts that were difficult in CSS and trivial in UI framework layout systems.

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ulisesrmzroche 4320 days ago
Yeah, for sure. You can even go so far as to say that all tools impose some technical debt but the difference amounts to what degree.
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