I wasted a day on CSS selector performance to make a website load 2ms faster | Trys Mudford
Picture me holding Trys back and telling him, “Leave it alone, mate, it’s not worth it!”
This is the trick that Charlotte used to get the nifty blobby effect on last year’s UX London site. Now there’s a tool to help you do the same.
Picture me holding Trys back and telling him, “Leave it alone, mate, it’s not worth it!”
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
Oh, this is a nice addition to the Utopia set of tools: when you don’t need a full-on type scale but you still want to figure out fluid clamp()
values, the clamp calculator has you covered.
It’s got permalinks too!
I suspect most people on opposing sides of the Tailwind debate actually complete agree on Tailwind itself. I don’t think we disagree on atomic CSS, or utility classes; I think our contention comes from the valuations we made long before we ever chose our tools. Where one of us sees a selling point, the other sees a flaw.
This is very much in line with what I’ve been talking about in my presentation on declarative design.
As Jeremy Keith put it so well: where it comes to styling, Builders want imperative programming; they want to specify what they want, where they want, how they want it. No surprises.
Crafters instead want declarative programming; they understand how to wield the power of creating rules of governance within a complex system, and wish to use that power, rather than micromanaging the browser.
CSS is better now. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than its ever been, and it’s better than tailwind. Give it another try. Don’t reach for big globs of libraries to paper over the issues you think it has.
This is why it’s so important to re-evaluate technology decisions.
I’ve seen people, lead and principal engineers, who refuse to learn modern JS, insisting that since it was bad in 2006 its bad today. Worse still is some of these people have used their leadership positions to prevent the use of modern JS.
Try writing your HTML in HTML, your CSS in CSS, and your JavaScript in JavaScript.
Let me hear your blocky talk.
Defining the inputs instead of trying to control the outputs.
Worst buddy movie ever.
Materials and tools; client and server; declarative and imperative; inclusion and privilege.