Two Very Good Talks About CSS

Published October 2, 2023, by Tommy George

“Why is CSS so weird?” (Miriam Suzanne)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHUtMbJw8iA

We get universal device support. The trade-off is we lose control, and that’s a feature.

This made me have a “spicy take” interpretation: If you do not want universal device support, then do no write for the Web platform. (Please consider the inverse).

“Why doesn’t CSS have scope?” (Heydon Pickering)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S_kXfqH-u4

Heydon’s list from one of the slides:

• CSS does have scope
• CSS is fundamentally a scoping mechanism
• CSS was invented to apportion scope
• You cannot write CSS without setting scope
• CSS without scope is a syntactically invalid bunch of pointless unicode characters.

“… this isn’t a CSS problem. This is a people problem.”

“… you’re enabling people to duplicate effort.”