Maybe stop throwing mud at CSS at developer conferences?

At almost every developer conference, there is about to be a report in which this "funny gif" will be:

Peter Griffin from the animated series of the same name tries to close the blinds and confuses them completely, pulling the ropes at random, until he gets out of his temper and rips them off the window. Caption: “CSS”.

The public always loves this, and from here you can successfully go on to talk about CSS problems and examples of their solutions. But in most cases - and the more "techie" this conference is, the more likely it is - the beginning of a tirade about how creepy this CSS is, how terrible its architecture is and how illogical it is. Etc...

Here's what: I'm fed up with it. This is not witty, this is not true, and because of this we look like pompous know-it-alls, who would just work as usual. This erects a tough barrier between “developers” and “people doing all sorts of web stuff,” they are “fake developers.” And this is nonsense. Impudent, dangerous nonsense that does not help us - not a bit - to develop our community of developers so that new people, very different, would like to join it.

There is a fact: we make incredibly complex, impressive and beautiful things on the web. In the most democratic system of disseminating information and - today - on a high-tech and amazing software platform. If you think that you know every facet of it and deal with all this without the help of other fellow experts, you are blinded by your own self-confidence. And I would not waste time working with such a bastard.

Yes, joking around CSS and its Frankenstein syntax is easy. It is also easy to show that all its tasks can be solved with other technologies. But this does not give the right - in general - to belittle and ignore people who like CSS and for whom it is a favorite tool for creating great user interfaces.

In other words: do not like it - do not use it. Work with someone you like. Do not go to a fortuneteller that if you use technology that you do not take seriously and do not like, then the output will be crap. This is a waste of time. When you complain about difficulties because you wanted the technology to bend to the rules of your comfort zone, you actually complain that you did not master it. Those who are fortunate enough to love the technology and master its strengths do not have such difficulties.

This mug with the inscription “CSS is awesome” pops up every now and then:

This is a joke about the fact that CSS is not suitable for solving this problem with crawling text. Well, tell me, what was there to do? Add scroll? In CSS, this is possible. Just crop the text? It is also possible. Trim and add ellipsis at the end? Could be so. Will at least one of these solutions be good? Not. The main thing here is that the text did not fit into the container. A fixed container on the web is a mistake. You cannot fix anything in an environment that, by definition, can be of any size and form factor. So the mistake here is in thinking in fixed containers, and not at all in the fact that CSS doesn’t do anything magically with text you don’t control. It would surely cause you trouble in the interfaces.

Weak to you to look at those breathtaking things that Ana Tudor does on CSS , and tell me in person that this is “fake programming” and is done in a “dumb language”?

CodePen example

Just try not to see the advantages of flexboxes and the ability to create dynamic interfaces that adapt to the amount of content and the needs of the screens of any size that they give us, as Zoe Mickley Gillenwater tells us about them :

And can you not be delighted with the power of the grid layout that Rachel Andrew talks about ?

Try not to lose your head from the beauty of building complex layouts with text and shapes that are not constrained by hard-pixel thinking, as explained by Jen Simmons .

And just try not to marvel at the power of CSS filters with blending modes and the scope for artistic creation that they discover, as Juna Kravets explains :

Video on Vimeo

So the next time you want to "make a funny joke about CSS," please keep in mind that people who understand it are by no means repainting letters. CSS is a very expressive language for creating complex interfaces, covering a wide variety of user needs. If you are not able to realize all this - and I myself admit that I am no longer able to - have the conscience not to belittle those who are aware. Better thank them for this work and work with them together.