Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design

You still shouldn't use @import, which is a designer sucking programming. @import can cause FOUC as well as slowing down page render a lot.

dup <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345782" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345782</a>

Permalink just in case... <a href="http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/" rel="nofollow">http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/</a>

"Some browsers ship with default stylesheets that are simply horrible. One notorious problem, for example, is the &#60;table&#62; tag that forgets to inherit font settings from its parents."<p>That's not 'bumbling browser makers can't create sensible default stylesheets', that's 'pages in quirks mode duplicate the oddities of Netscape 4 as closely as possible'. Use a DOCTYPE that triggers standards mode, validate your HTML and you'll find a lot of CSS things get much easier.

The post actually contained some very good tips for any beginning designer, although the title does the article a disservice ("Why Do Web Designers Suck at Programming?")

Because some do not care enough about other users' experience -- like didn't bother submitting the proper permalink at the bottom of the page.

Programmers suck at design because it isn't programming, it's design.

For color picking, HSV is very much better than RGB. With HSV though, I still don't have a good intuition for Saturation VS Value tuning so it seems there could be an even better color system.<p>Munsell appears to be that system, however there doesn't seem to be any public description of it that would allow one to implement it so you have to use some proprietary crap. I think that's a real loss for humanity.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSV_color_space" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSV_color_space</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell</a>

My experience is that the same programmers who suck at CSS design, are the same who suck at GUI design, and the same who suck at creating modular code , and the same who hardly ever indent their code, and the same who write spaghetti code,<p>... and the same programmers who thinks that if it runs, its good ... and the same who are just not good programmers.<p>Think about it, if you are a generally good programmer, you would never create a bad UI, CSS or otherwise! ... Linus Torvalds as far as I know don't create UIs, he is a very good programmer too

Let's face it. CSS design is a visual art, and not every programmer is good at it. You either have it or don't. I have seen many programmers who do a fine job with CSS.

I fit the stereotype. compass has saved me <a href="http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/tree/master" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass/tree/master</a><p>With compass I get a programmer's mindset and lots of predefined typography goodness. It still takes lots of work, but I have been able to produce a clean site now.

In the article he mentions using @import over LINK due to some convoluted logic about "easier to re-use". LINK and @import behave exactly the same, except the well-known performance issues. Why should we trust someone who doesn't actually understand browsers?

<i>Give your page some air</i><p>Always my biggest problem. Being a natural maximizer (as many programmers are), I can't stand non-performing real estate. It's taking me a long time to understand that white space <i>is</i> performing, just not the same way that code performs.

Programmers don't suck at CSS Design, it's Stefano's stereotype of programmers that do.

great tips!