The story of this asteroid having a ~3% chance to hit Earth was huge, but I never heard about it being ruled out shortly afterward. It still has a 4% to hit the Moon.

Atomic CSS is great. It does abuse class="" in the same way style="" was abused. It's counter-intuitive but the obvious code smells produced here are better than the non-obvious code smells created by other style architecture approaches.

I've always now-and-then packaged up and open-sourced the pattern I use for CSS. The projects have gotten smaller and smaller. This reflects well on CSS as a technology.

I think class="" has more to offer in an information density sense. There's more potential there than style="" had. Instantly lumping them together was my first response too, but I was wrong. The in-the-HTML shorthand of frameworks like Bootstrap/Tailwind/CASS is insanely useful in a way that inline styles never were.

The argument I make in the book is that the last 5% of CSS/design should be written by people who can write CSS. Nobody else should even be writing CSS because it turns into a huge mess when everyone jumps in.

I mothballed this project because people were so incredibly cruel about it (a CSS project!). Remember that people who work on this stuff are people, and we're just trying to make things better. Also, you can pry .vertical-center from my cold, dead hands.

How do you expect anyone to learn CSS if they're being told to not even think about writing CSS unless they already know CSS? The whole premise demotivates learning. Experts weren't always experts. They had to start somewhere. If the world were to follow your advice, CSS would soon become dead knowledge. I am absolutely perplexed that you could write something, an act of conveying knowledge, and that you wanted to convey "don't learn this". Do you not see how weird that is?

Yep, it's weird and controversial. That's why I wrote a book explaining it and used a pseudonym.

Now: ~60% of devs know some CSS, rest feel guilty

YSAC's pitch: ~10% of devs know lots of CSS, rest avoid it without guilt (they suck and that's okay)

I guess 0% would mean a dead CSS, so it's closer to dead, sure.

If you get a more powerful saw, you can either cut down more trees or you can spend less time cutting down trees. CSS is a more powerful saw now. I'm suggesting spending less time cutting down trees instead of cutting down more trees.

Learning how to properly use a chainsaw is of use to more than just those in the logging and treecare industries. Nobody is going to call me to remove that tree that's endangering a historic building or to cutdown a few hundred acres of raw toilet paper, but I still need to understand how and when to sharpen the chain if I'm going to be cutting down trees on my own land for use as firewood.

I think you would have had significantly less blowback if you approached the subject from a positive angle. I know you were probably attempting to be humorous, but it just comes off as something wrong.

That sort of humor is best left for the experts...

It's easy to mock people who've had a failed project. I wish you success with yours.

If we didn't fail, we wouldn't learn.

lol.. I'm not sure what _you_ mean by .vertical-center but I wrote this last weekend for my latest project.

   .center { display: flex; justify-content: center; flex-direction: column; text-align:center}
   .vcenter { display: flex; justify-content: center; flex-direction: column; }
   .hcenter { text-align: center; }

Basically the same idea, yep. CASS doesn't use abbreviations or numerals though.

Thanks! Lists were the bane of my existence with this project. I could never make all the browsers happy.

This is a #wontfix (sorry), but I might fork it into a new, LLM-oriented CSS project. Fonts and lists will be the first things I look at.

It's true. Between atomic CSS libraries and LLMs, there's almost no reason to write CSS nowadays.

The predecessor to this project was a Bootstrap 3 theme: https://rriepe.github.io/1pxdeep/

The book has a lot of content over what to make pretty and what not to make pretty. I think knowing what not to bother with is an underrated skill. A lot of what inspired me to write it was backenders handing off markup that they tried to make semi-passable. Unstyled HTML, please!

I agree. CASS (the library this book was promoting) is actually really great paired with LLMs. If I revisit this project, it'll be along the lines of using it with LLMs.

The perfection should be downstream of the project's coded standards, not downstream of the faithful implementation of the designer's work. Some designers are really good about maintaining standards-- but the book would argue all that effort should be spent elsewhere.

It's basically "the arbitrary padding the designer liked in the moment" vs. "the standard padding that's everywhere in the project." This book argues you should always use the standard padding. Your product should be pixel-perfect, just not in the PSD-to-HTML sense.

> It's basically "the arbitrary padding the designer liked in the moment" vs. "the standard padding that's everywhere in the project." This book argues you should always use the standard padding. Your product should be pixel-perfect, just not in the PSD-to-HTML sense.

Oh yeah - I remember my first job things had to be pixel perfect to what the boss had mocked up in Photoshop. Thankfully at my next job it was just use whatever the project's CSS gives you unless it looks terrible.

I don't do much frontend any more but my current marketing team is happy with anything that looks reasonable.

Edited the year into the title. CASS (the CSS library) and YSAC (this book) have been a huge marketing mess, to be honest. And yeah the substack was part of it-- I think the book came first though. Kyle Yeats (rhymes with stylesheets) was going to be a Youtube persona but I could never really get the feel of it right.

The book morphed into being more about project management. I think there's a lot of value in it still, in that respect, so I'm putting it all online for free.

Old is actually good now because of LLMs. You want something old.