The author has an enthusiasm for a new piece of CSS that I haven't seen in a solid decade. I appreciate it a lot. In my 20s I would have tinkered with the possibilities of this thing for hours/days. Trying to get stuff to work in CSS brought me joy. Now it's kind of easy, thanks to flexbox, grid, and the fact that most websites and apps follow standard design principles. We've "solved" web UI, for the most part.
I guess a better way to say what I meant is "common design language." Things that become components in some component library.
They aren't written down, set in stone, spec'd in any way, but for example:
* the idea of a hero image with a headline and a sub headline followed by a call to action is common on many SaaS product websites.
* news websites all look very coherent, so they've adopted some sort of typographical rhythm just like they would in a print publication
* the multitude of component libraries means advanced UI can be programmed with some readymade parts, diminishing the need to write custom CSS for something like an image carousel (for a trivial example)
What we solved? Layout? Still need to go back a re read some shady aspects of flex and grid. Sticky positioning is one of the most useful features ever; yet if for any any reason doesn’t work it’s very hard or almost impossible to debug and understand why(does any parent up the tree have any overflow?), and good luck finding any good documentation explaining corner cases. Without dev tools and a lot of wasted clicks it’s impossible to debug css from source code alone, you have to inspect that element at runtime. Most native inputs still have very limited styling capabilities(please don’t tell me it’s a good thing), we waited years for native modals and popovers. Last time I checked can’t still animate from display none to block with height. I can go on for days, my point is how did we become so accustomed to all the problems css have and lost any bit of criticism?
