Why would he be when it's mostly cross-browser? It means you dont need to draw the triangle and throw it into a .png or your sprite then deal with all that crap. You have a triangle that you can use to point at things AND you can modify the borders to change the size of that triangle on the fly. Yay.
I'm currently learning CSS, and it really all seems like dirty hacks to me. margin: o auto;? So I can't tell this to just horizontally center itself automatically?
Don't get me wrong, I love dirty hacks, just not if they're forced onto me. I guess in a couple of weeks stockholm syndrome will set in, and I'll love it, but for the beginner, especially if you're moving there from either design (What, I need to hack things to get this typography display right?), or programming (What, I need to learn a whole bag of tricks to get the site to style properly?), CSS seems like that dirty pimp down the street to you. Yeah, he's fabulous, but he always wants you to do tricks for him.
Really? I started out doing CSS, and I still love it 10 years later. Sure, it has its quirks, but now that we have tools like SASS, it makes CSS so much more fun all over again.
SASS and LESS provide really nice language improvements, but they don't fix all the crap about box models and positioning and polyfills and byzantine precedence rules and the necessity for silly hacks like this. It's just too complicated and painful to make things look the way you want them to look, which is the point of CSS. I've gotten pretty good at it and I've come to care a lot about how it works (e.g. this little visualization is a really nice demonstration), but this state of affairs saddens me; I wish I could concentrate on other stuff, and not how to make a goddamn triangle.
(At some level of technical hair-splitting, this isn't per-se CSS's fault and is more general DOM crapiness, but that distinction is largely irrelevant. They're still problems I'm expected to solve with CSS.)
I'm with you. Anyone who says CSS is A-OK doesnt understand it fully or doesnt have the imagination for something better to replace it. It's really the most shite language I've ever had to deal with.
That's the thing though, we have to deal with it. I don't get why there isn't just a complete replacement trending on HN every other month. Sure, it needs browser support and it would forgo a lot of the CSS-specific optimizations baked into the browsers but there has to be a more efficient way to handle the DOM.
I think CSS is A-OK and I believe I understand it fully as I've been using it for most of my career. Most of its "problems" are rooted in bad implementations in browsers or people trying to use it for things it wasn't designed for, not in the spec itself.
But maybe I think this because I don't view it as a language, to me it's more of a configuration file that holds sets of instructions. It's getting closer to a proper language though.
You can have your opinion I suppose, but nearly every web tech I've worked with over the years has had its transitions from good to bad to hated only to end up somehow good again.
Well, margin: auto is how you center things horizontally. What? You want something like align: center instead? Well, that's just semantics. It's a legacy issue built on extending instead of improving.
Here's a fun one, make a div display: inline-block and then use text-align: center on its parent. Why the hell does the div center when the rule is for text? Is it badly implemented or is it badly named? Without reading the actual spec it's a mystery.
I use CSS extensively nearly every day. I learned CSS before IE6 existed. You don't like dirty hacks? I've likely forgotten more dirty hacks then you'll ever be required to know about. Compared to how things started, CSS is a godsend to us today. But I'm not going to yell to you to get off my lawn, because the fun has only just started and you should feel free to join in.
The problems you listed that you have with CSS, you do realize that's mostly because of how browsers implemented CSS and some related technologies right? CSS isn't a dirty pimp, he's actually the guy down the street that knows all about fashion and design but everybody keeps wanting him to build cars.
It's not a hack, margin: 0 auto is how you tell a non-table element to center itself.
Sure, there's some oddities to CSS, but if you understand the box model it's not that foreign.
