Is CSS Really That Hard?

Most Software Engineers think that CSS is difficult, but is CSS really that hard? In this video, I explain why I think CSS is tricky and how it can actually be easy.

[ATIWatchReviews]

I would say YES it is. It's one of the hardest languages out there. The whole spatial awareness thing, everything being connected to the things around it (meaning one small change can break your design), the nesting/hierarchy etc and then there's making it responsive to different devices. It's horribly complicated and convoluted. Even the selectors system is terrible. I would say it needs a wrecking ball putting through it and a new system built from scratch!

[kimberlypowell]

Kevin Powell is an absolute blessing for CSS that man knows almost everything about it.

[jordyalejandroubaldomorale]

Being a Self-taugh is hard, not just by the fact that you need to look out everything, but also when you go to a physical course or live at least or get a degree on the college and you are feeling frustrated or dumb because you don't understand CSS you can at least share your concerns with your team, and they hear you struggling and help you with your questions.

As a Self-taugh, sometimes i just don't know if the topic itself is difficult or i am just dumb and don't get it, but your video made me feel like someone understands me and that after all, is not impossible, just put the effort in learn it property, go through the information slowly and you'll get it.

Thank you for uploading this video bro! :)

[KilgoreTroutAsf]

CSS is simple alright. What's hard is to build an encyclopedic memory about which properties don't mix, don't work together, or change behavior. For all 129 CSS properties that's only 129 take 2 = 8385 pairs to memorize.

[PoojaDutt]

I’ve been a backend developer my whole life (as in, 3 years lol). I really needed to see this video, as I’ll be transitioning into a full stack role! I always used to buy into the stigma that CSS was just used to make things look “pretty”.. but it’s actually a lot more versatile than that! Thanks for making this!

[sethhochberg]

I'm a backend developer by trade, but a friend of mine asked to create an extremely simple webpage for him. I figured I could learn HTML/CSS over a weekend and create the page. I patched an ugly home-made webpage together and it worked, but halfway through I was amazed how difficult it was to center something. I asked my programming friend how to do this, and he was like, "DUDE THAT'S A MEME!"

[theshwingbatty]

Using Chrome Developer Tools really helped me get to grips with CSS. Being able to hover over an element and instantly see most of the important properties, as well as the elements place in the DOM, really sped up my learning. Still use it to this day when developing!

[sumanthprabhu]

CSS is easy to understand but Difficult to Master

[cantcode]

I think the fact that CSS has invisible implications to every property you set is the #1 reason I have trouble with it. I’m just starting to learn CSS and you are absolutely right that it’s super frustrating. Wish there was a dev tool mode that just showed your content with color coded objects around that element, that when you moused over the page itself, it would give you context sensitive tooltips of what that color represents and thereby giving you a clear understanding of why the element in question is positioned where it is. Maybe be able to set one element to track and have that inform the tool tip that pops up when you mouse over the surrounding colored areas.

[enmanuelcruzdejesus]

css was always a issue for me, thank you for sharing that I'm not alone in this

[asagiai]

Yes CSS is really hard. But it's hard for a different reason.

Like you need to know the flow of design.
And how each elements interact with each other

[preserveoladipo]

I like the way you communicate informally, you said what is in my mind and that earned you a subscriber

[m_so]

I was actually waiting for someone to answer this question, Am I the only one who find css hard. Thank you for the video

[PerpetualEducation]

How refreshingly honest!!! Thanks for this.

1:10 "I don't think that CSS really is that hard" - 100% agree. It's the shift in thinking that is hard.

4:16 People can go their whole careers misunderstanding what elements are what display type. So, the most basic CSS properties can often be the thing that trips them up. You can't put a margin-top on a link because it is display: inline. If you don't know that, then you'll start making all the wrong choices to get around it. The other part is that you don't usually center the item. You tell the parent to center its child.

4:43 "Overall in CSS, you don't have those same programming paradigms." It does! It's all just key: value pairs. And some OOP style inheritance. It's simple and declarative, but - aren't those exactly like a JavaScript object? Or an HTML element with a set of key:value pair attributes?

8:30 For JS people, this is similar to a global variable. You wouldn't want to style your heading level 2s in the global scope. So, instead - you can scope based on component names or create styles for type patterns and apply them in context. But it's certainly not taught very well.

9:30 "I hate CSS" - the funny part about this, is that CSS can only do exactly what you told it to do. If it's "broken" it's because you told it to do something - that you don't want it to do.

9:49 Another major mind-shift is to build from the smallest screen first vs taking a desktop layout and then trying to reverse engineer the responsive layout decisions. Building the site-wide layout as a fully functional component first - and making sure it works in a blueprint form, and then thinking of structure and the components that inhabit that structure can really help simplify. Then each component becomes its own mini-website and it's much easier to reason about.

[aminehl]

I just wonder how on earth can CSS be hard ? I've never used anything except for vanilla CSS btw and learning CSS took me two weeks at most to be at the level of using it without thinking what is what, how am I going to display this layout, and why that thing didn't work

[navaneethmkrishnan]

The thing about CSS mistakes is that sometimes, those mistakes work perfectly until one day it doesn't.

[curtisg]

So happy your consistently uploading again clement :)

[comradepeter]

More and more it feels like most of the coding jobs are just about making and maintaing websites... why are websites the only thing most tech jobs cater to? There's so much more tech can do but almost everybody is just rehashing the same concepts and working on the same thing..

[foxdie]

You can create font color (easy) or you can create a CSS scalable architecture (hard)

[snehamoy]

I cry every time trying to position the background images correctly 😫