CSS { In Real Life } | Cool Tools

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!”

The State of ES5 on the Web

This is grim:

If you look at the data below on how popular websites today are actually transpiling and deploying their code to production, it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yet still doesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.

How do build tools break backwards compatibility? | Go Make Things

If you have a project that uses just plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can just open up the files and start working on them at any time. A project from 20 years ago will still work just fine, and can be easily modified.

Projects that use build tools? Well… to work with them, you need your build tools to actually build. And that’s not always guaranteed.

Also, it me:

One of my least favorite things as a developer is wanting to do a quick patch fix on an older project—I’m talking a simple one-line of CSS kind of fix—but first having to spend 30 minutes patching my build tools to get them running again.

Tailwind, and the death of web craftsmanship

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.

The New CSS · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

CSS is now the most powerful design tool for the Web.

I think this is now true. It’ll be interesting to see how this will affect tools and processes:

What I expect to see overall is that the perception and thus the role of CSS in the design process will change from being mainly a presentational styling tool at the end of the waterfall to a tool that is being used at the heart of making design decisions early on.