On: Old dogs, new CSS tricks

[patates]

> I just instinctually don't even bother with new (as in 3-4 years old) CSS or JS features most of the time. It's pretty deeply ingrained in me and I suspect many other devs who were around in that time.

I'm also a web dev with nearly 20 years and do exactly this as well. Old versions (or any version of) IE crushed our dreams too many times to feel comfortable delivering anything modern, let alone cutting edge.

[Chris_Newton → patates]

As a developer of a similar vintage, I can relate to this mindset, but I think we should be careful about it. We learned in an era when differences in browser behaviour were a big deal and new versions of browsers sometimes came along years apart. But those days are long gone — even Safari now gets several updates each year — and we should let the habits they created go with them.

Should we be cautious about relying on non-standard features or trusting the perma-beta culture that Google never seems to have grown out of? Of course. But there have been many recent developments that are useful and already widely supported, and not using those when they provide a good solution to an immediate problem seems counterproductive.

[lobsterthief → patates]

Same here (>20 years at this point)—I just know how to do nearly everything with existing CSS features, or else I’m already using a framework like MUI that eliminates a lot of the issues the new CSS features aim to solve. For example, the unique class names and low specificity offered by MUI negates the need for the new container functionality.

I’ve definitely used :has() though to replace the need for certain CSS combinators—for example, being able to style a label that wraps a checkbox based on the checkbox being checked, rather than relying on the next-sibling combinator while placing the label after the checkbox input. That’s pretty cool and solves some limitations that existed previously.