Josh (the blog)

I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.


@joahua

CSS that sucks

A few days back, I was accused of writing CSS that sucked. That’s not to say it doesn’t work, only that it’s laid out like crap and no other rational human being could possibly follow it – or, when they did, wound up pulling faces like this:

Steve pulling a face at me.

After some attempt to refute this, it was eventually accepted as true — I don’t mean to write poorly formatted CSS, it just happens! Part of the reason for this is I just add stuff until it works, meaning to fix it sometime later on: but how do you “fix” CSS to make it neat?

What structure do people use for a textual description of visual style? At least some of my problem is that I try to follow a few different schools of layout thought simultaneously, trying to order things sequentially from top to bottom, and by semantic function, and by whatever else feels right at the time. Clearly, it wasn’t right.

If you’re a CSS guru genius who can write both functional styles that can also be deciphered by other humans, leave a pingback or comment!