> "But at the end of the day, you have to know CSS anyway"
If you string-replace "CSS" with "assembly", most of Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming" [1] still seems to apply. People used to argue this passionately that knowing how to write assembly by hand was critical to being a good programmer.
> "Love it or loathe it, you must at least learn it."
This might be true today, but it would be a shame if tooling didn't level up to a degree where CSS becomes mostly a compile target (just like assembly is today).
At the end of the day, CSS provides styling tools for a massive medium, one that should be accessible much further beyond the 0.25% of the world that knows how to code. The main way we can unlock that is with better tools and better abstractions. It's wholly unrealistic to get everyone to be as good at hand-crafting CSS as the author, nor should it be the goal.
CSS is getting more and more powerful and more complex, and it's unrealistic for folks to continue hand-crafting in perpetuity. Even today, with some of the world's best software engineers, I routinely see this:
* Most devs don't know how to create a radial gradient from memory
* Most devs don't know how to hand code shape-outside code, especially polygon
* Most devs guess-and-check repeatedly as they work with Flexbox props and use cheatsheets even after years of practice (while designers are running circles around them using visual abstractions like [2])
* CSS Grid minmax formats, don't get me started...
I personally love crafting CSS by hand, there's a certain satisfaction to it. But if that's the primary way that folks are styling stuff on the web 5 years from now, to me that would imply that we did a bad job of exposing this wonderful technology to orders of magnitude more people.
> Most devs don't know how to create a radial gradient from memory
I think I largely agree with you — giving more people the ability to build and design stuff with web technologies is something I care a lot about. To me, the answer is to build better tools around CSS, rather than creating a multitude of abstractions and creating tools that target those.
My belief is that CSS tooling hasn't evolved as quickly as JS tooling (and hence CSS-in-JS) because the JS community has often had a bit of a snooty attitude towards CSS and people who write it. That's something I hope we can change.
If you string-replace "CSS" with "assembly", most of Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming" [1] still seems to apply. People used to argue this passionately that knowing how to write assembly by hand was critical to being a good programmer.
> "Love it or loathe it, you must at least learn it."
This might be true today, but it would be a shame if tooling didn't level up to a degree where CSS becomes mostly a compile target (just like assembly is today).
At the end of the day, CSS provides styling tools for a massive medium, one that should be accessible much further beyond the 0.25% of the world that knows how to code. The main way we can unlock that is with better tools and better abstractions. It's wholly unrealistic to get everyone to be as good at hand-crafting CSS as the author, nor should it be the goal.
CSS is getting more and more powerful and more complex, and it's unrealistic for folks to continue hand-crafting in perpetuity. Even today, with some of the world's best software engineers, I routinely see this:
* Most devs don't know how to create a radial gradient from memory
* Most devs don't know how to hand code shape-outside code, especially polygon
* Most devs guess-and-check repeatedly as they work with Flexbox props and use cheatsheets even after years of practice (while designers are running circles around them using visual abstractions like [2])
* CSS Grid minmax formats, don't get me started...
I personally love crafting CSS by hand, there's a certain satisfaction to it. But if that's the primary way that folks are styling stuff on the web 5 years from now, to me that would imply that we did a bad job of exposing this wonderful technology to orders of magnitude more people.
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[1] http://worrydream.com/dbx/
[2] https://www.flexboxgame.com/