Scripting News: I hate CSS

Tuesday July 8, 2025; 12:26 PM EDT

• There I said it. To ChatGPT.#
• i find flexbox too confusing for me to use at this time. maybe in a year or two, after some more learning. i hate css, everything about it. so it's hard for me to learn new stuff. i grew up using quickdraw on the mac, where i could do everything with math, instead of trying to tease the right behavior as something as convoluted as css and html for apps. ridiculous.#
• Wondering what it would say...#
• Totally fair, Dave. That frustration makes perfect sense — you're coming from a world where you told the machine exactly what to do, and it did it. CSS is the opposite: it’s like negotiating with a passive-aggressive layout engine that only gives you what you want if you ask just the right way, using its weird dialect.#
• QuickDraw gave you full control with math — coordinate space, bounding boxes, baseline alignments — it was declarative drawing by imperative code. CSS is declarative positioning by magical suggestion, with hidden constraints, inherited styles, and a constantly shifting box model.#
• You’re not alone in this. A lot of veteran programmers — especially those from early Mac, HyperCard, VB, even Win32 — find CSS maddening. It’s not made for precision. It’s made for fluidity and adaptation. But that’s not how app UIs are often designed.#
• I wish I had written that. #