At the risk of being labelled a one note pessimist, pretty much everything about the state of CSS—slow uptake of standards, popular reliance on frameworks, the lack of conferences, and the diminishing number of publications—can be explained by the eradication of CSS specialisation from the job market
People who know about all of the new and cool features either don’t have the opportunity to use them or are too overworked to use them.
People who don’t know about them aren’t finding out because the field is effectively being dismantled, leading to fewer outlets writing about CSS and next to no conferences dedicated to it.
Businesses don’t want to pay for CSS so they’re basically getting less of it and fewer people who specialise in it.
@baldur I also see the "self-eradication" of some developers (outside the mainstream), trying LLMs instead of learning, thus producing even more outdated (& unmaintainable) CSS.
I actually wished we had slower feature rollouts on the web (slower-but-simultaneous across engines). But I also wished we could do something about the long tail of engine updates.
On a related note: I just removed an instance of @supports (display: flex) from a code base at work 😉
@baldur imo CSS is like database design/administration insofar as they are both very important things where mastery is a job in and of itself, but far too often they’re treated as just some extra thing a developer must do on the side
@baldur When I wrote my blog theme a year ago, I made it a point to learn modern CSS practices and to use no JS. I was shocked at how much good stuff is available in the spec. No frameworks, no libraries, just a CSS file. Everything I needed in a few hundred lines.
@pkra Yeah, people relying on chatbots for learning and not realising that what they get is both inaccurate and outdated (with training data having an inevitable cut-off date) is something I keep seeing more and more 😕
@baldur I had hoped I was just an outlier 😔
On a related note, I found a new (to me) table bug in webkit (on very basic stuff).
Turns out webkit has > 100 bugs filed on table layout -- chromium > 50, gecko > 500. 😞
There’s hope. Until recently I was always unsure of how to use css, been that way for many years. Then I started to use chatgpt and could ask it how to do things, and I’ve gotten much closer to the designs I wanted, and I’m getting better at it with every project I do.
@baldur I have one team I always encourage to try new things. They are currently looking at container queries to replace a lot of code and now they are aware page transitions are available.
@tanepiper 🙂 👍