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support@oxygenbuilder.comThis page is meant to be an ongoing collection of examples of why HTML and CSS are a failure.
There are JavaScript and TypeScript frameworks that attempt to smooth over these issues by abstracting away the nuts and bolts of HTML and CSS, but these do nothing to smooth over the learning curve, because they obfuscate how things really work under the hood. People need to learn what their technology is built on top of, to master the technology. There are also frameworks built in entirely different languages that present more logical schemas for defining UI views that are then converted into CSS, like Flutter, in Dart lang. The problem in general is, every time someone tries to "simplify" things by adding a layer on top to abstract away ugly design problems, they add more cognitive overhead to the system.
The only solution to complexity is to fix the problem at its source. Just like the medical industry, the software engineers keep trying to treat the symptom, instead of killing the source of the disease.
The top search result for HTML and CSS tutorials and reference docs in Google is w3schools, with MDN usually coming in close behind it. These sources are both terrible. w3schools, for instance, never details the syntax for CSS properties, and their "Try it yourself" links at the end of the document do not contain rigorous examples.
First we have a comment from Alex2 on css-tricks.com:
Well, it’s bad on many levels. Too verbose, hard to manage, it already creates “frameworks” around it, just to make it manageable. 25 years ago we already had tools, WYSIWIG IDE’s and ways to define UI and “responsive” views… For geeze sake, can we come back to roots and come up with simple and effective markup language with UI tools and plain resizing rules for view elements!?
