A lot of CSS seems excessive but I, for one, am glad with a lot of the additions over the years. CSS tables are great (better than flexbox for many layouts IMO), CSS masks combined with gradients and other background tricks save us from manually positioned SVGs that have to be just the right size.
Recent additions include the :has pseudo class, which I've wanted for a while, a subgrid layout to alleviate the problems nesting grids can cause, scroll snapping should make those annoying Apple style scrolling web pages less of a problem to deal with, and there are tons of other great features out there as well.
With these, we can finally get rid of the janky mess that we needed 10 years ago. No more magical "width: auto auto" for centering text. No more lists of "display: float" to get dynamic sizing.
The newer the standards are, the better the documentation is in my experience. Older CSS had a lot of shitty implementation defined behavior that has since been documented to correspond to what most browsers seemed to do anyway. The newer standards seem to be written with an actual intend to be implemented consistently.
You could build almost any modern web page in Microsoft FrontPage twenty years ago with enough carefully crafted GIFs, but I think we all agree that CSS has improved for the better since then. If it weren't for all these "living standards", you would barely be able to use the web on your phone. I remember the PDA internet era, back before the iPhone made showing real websites on your smartphone a thing developers became aware of. It was not good.
Recent additions include the :has pseudo class, which I've wanted for a while, a subgrid layout to alleviate the problems nesting grids can cause, scroll snapping should make those annoying Apple style scrolling web pages less of a problem to deal with, and there are tons of other great features out there as well.
With these, we can finally get rid of the janky mess that we needed 10 years ago. No more magical "width: auto auto" for centering text. No more lists of "display: float" to get dynamic sizing.
The newer the standards are, the better the documentation is in my experience. Older CSS had a lot of shitty implementation defined behavior that has since been documented to correspond to what most browsers seemed to do anyway. The newer standards seem to be written with an actual intend to be implemented consistently.
You could build almost any modern web page in Microsoft FrontPage twenty years ago with enough carefully crafted GIFs, but I think we all agree that CSS has improved for the better since then. If it weren't for all these "living standards", you would barely be able to use the web on your phone. I remember the PDA internet era, back before the iPhone made showing real websites on your smartphone a thing developers became aware of. It was not good.