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CSS is not a language, it is markup.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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They have started to add programmatic elements to it and it won't be long before there will be a full blown css scripting language based on COBOL - because for reasons that are unclear to me the entire community is committed to making things as complex/multi-layered/obtuse as possible.
Whatever you do on a webpage you must never just put an input element on the form - it must have a template that references other templates and style sheets that must be run through SASS and dozens of other utilities/mods/nightmares - all to collect a first and last name from a customer.
I swear to Judas that some developers go into a project seeking to add as much complexity as possible.
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separation of content and style, that's what they say when they teach little kids about css
the next logical step it was
i never new what hit me, that was around 98. i discovered it was css when every page broke on every browser. it was said that browsers were guilty of not heaving decent support for it. for me it was the other way around, so i never looked at css
whenever i see it embedded in html i just skip that part
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That's why we have LESS and SASS, both able to do what you and I want.
Personally, I still prefer using tables for layout, because it doesn't move elements around in odd places, as floating divs often do, but I am trying to get used to it, because it can make it easier to have one page for all sizes of screens.
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Like you, I have worked in our profession for a very long time, retiring in 2014 after 42+ years in this career. Its not that I had gotten fed up working with the technologies. I simply couldn't stand the arrogant incompetents any longer. So I believe I know where you may be coming from.
However, I think you may be confusing the way CSS should be used and the way it has been abused.
CSS is very good for simply making generic styles for a variety of HTML interfaces given its object-like nature for such definitions.
However, like all software tools, its creators and users\developers seem to have to always extend their tools to death implementing ambiguity after ambiguity until people eventually react to all the bloat as you have with CSS.
The problem with all software today is that both vendors and developers simply can't desist from creating and\or using every possibility any single language and\or framework is capable of or provides.
Look at the recent "innovations" with the Microsoft frameworks. Do we really have to give up the standard framework implementations to create a quality application? Not really. Its just that Microsoft can't seem to leave well enough alone with what it already has.
And if it wanted to refine the existing tools, fine, but why go and create an entirely new framework infrastructure leaving everyone to have to consider yet again another conversion?
Its not as if many developers are really going to see any substantial improvement in efficiency and performance with the new frameworks while being forced to abandon the older ones. And if they do, they have already given up something to gain either. In the end, it is always a zero-sum game.
The problems you legitimately see with CSS are merely an outgrowth of an industry that has already passed its development zenith and now has no idea what to do with itself...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I'm not up to your 42+ years yet, only at 22+. there are days where I feel the industry is changing too fast for no apparent gain, but a lot more bloat. Not much chance of mastering a language anymore before it's replaced, or 'updated'.
although I agree partially with the original poster, I feel the responsibility for the odd behaviors of CSS lie in the browser engines not standardizing how it's implemented. like I can build something that looks great on Chrome, Firefox, and Android, but totally breaks on iOS products. (I'm not counting IE anymore it's gone, and new Edge is chrome underneath).
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I stopped enjoying web development basically after ASP.NET MVC was increasingly adopted, though I worked on one of the largest ASP.NET MVC projects at the time in the US (2010). With the exception of this one consulting assignment, I nonetheless, stayed with WebForms until I retired.
I simply could not understand the need to create such a new framework, (though the actual MVC technology was designed in the 1970s) with its massive increase in complexity.
I understood the limitations of WebForms but found that if implemented properly offered a better structure for compartmentalization where MVC took such compartmentalization to an extreme. I also had an engineering book written by a former Silicon Valley internals engineer who demonstrated that despite its pilloried reputation, WebForms could easily deliver lightening fast performance if configured properly against the hardware being used along with the proper configurations under IIS.
But everyone wanted to play with the new toys...
Now what do we have? A categorical mess of tools and environments for the web that are all basically predicated on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS (with JavaScript being one of the worst languages ever created for the web), bloated out front-ends as the era of the thin-client was forgotten, and increases in defects as teams rush to get their developments into production with their new fangled techniques of development (ie: Agile, DevOps, DevSecOps, and god only knows what else).
I imagine this turn of events came, in part, from the new theory on economics, which is supposed to provide an increasing amount of choices to the customer, when in reality good economic theory should provide an equitable balance.
But with the world of the "MeToo" faithful, everyone is casting their lots with all these new techniques and technologies with the hopes that maybe they too will hit something to help make them some extra monies.
I still do my own development with WPF and a game development engine but I do not see a good future for our field in the long term with such present trends. I see things only getting worse as software development becomes as much a bloated mess as US society has become...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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CSS can be frustrating at times. without the integrated debug tools in browsers to modify element styles and see the instant results or dig down into the layout, web development would be so much more painful.
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What bugs me is how unintuitive CSS is - simple rational commands have irrational behavior. Personally I like web pages that are simple and content-driven, without too many frills, bells and whistles - like they used to be! I often despair at the state of web technology - what should be a simple task of laying out information on a screen can become 'black magic' as you say. It's bizarre that we have arrived at this state of affairs.
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Maybe a bit easy, but...
Wish 2020 never started (5)
It goes without saying
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BEGUN? As in "sounds like 'be gone!'"
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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| No
It goes without saying
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wish (definition)
2020 YEAR
never N
started (indicator) YEARN
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Sounds good to me
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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We'll see if Mr. Bear agrees! 
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I was getting concerned I'd stretched the rules with "started"....
It goes without saying
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I don't think so, but maybe one of the more venerable participants will weigh in.
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Quote: The hive, then, extends itself as part of the environment through the social probings that individual bees enact where the intelligence of the interaction is not located in any one bee, or even a collective of bees as a stable unit, but in the "in-between" space of becoming: bees relating to the mattering milieu, which becomes articulated as a continuum to the social behavior of the insect community. This community is not based on representational content, then, but on distributed organization of the society of nonhuman actors.
This notion of the hive as a kind of headless milieu that moves, acts, and engages with its environment or umvelt relates closely to contemporary theories of swarms and the swarm-logic of networked communication. An emergent structure of multiple bodies or objects functioning in unison, swarm intelligence characterizes computer science algorithms, multi-agent systems, and insects.
Parikka, Jussi. "Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology." Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. p. 129
And we, Homo Saps, are the aphids ... zombified by the virus of language ... who are the disposable embodied instrumentalities of the ultimate winter of pure disincarnate intellects ... what Goethe called "the Mothers," what Newton called "Intelligencers" ... that ... who knows ? ... what knows ? ... ultimately may re-invent us to have some sand in their playpens to make mud-pies, or castles, with. Or, erasing the current hologram, and, inventing a new one where they play dumb and re-stage the whole evolutionary farce again,
Of course, I'm just an optimist high on the opiate the virus (language) keeps me addicted to, and, numbed with.
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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It's not really worth a tip or anything especially since how and where you use it depends heavily on what you're doing but...
I needed a friendly way to name my devices so when they show up in bluetooth or on the home network ready to be connected or paired, and you enumerate them, you can tell each one from the other.
So rather than
Lung Trainer
Lung Trainer
you need something like
Lung Trainer (Foo)
Lung Trainer (Bar)
Where foo and bar, are well known names. Now you could set it yourself but it's a hassle and these devices don't have keyboards.
So I'm using this to get female names for English
Namey - A random name generator[^]
So now it starts out as
Lung Trainer (New)
And whenever one first finds its way online somehow or bluetooth paired to its corresponding app it will use this webservice to pick a name for itself
you have to append /name.json to the above url to access the service. see the script they point you to for the REST URL parameters
The upshot is you'll see things like
Lung Trainer (Alice)
Lung Trainer (Mary)
Of course, the name is then displayed on the device, and you can change them later from the connected app if you like.
I wish Windows would pick defaults like this for computer network names when it goes to install.
I thought it was a neat idea anyway.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I suppose that's what our spammers use when creating accounts 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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That's the programmers thinking and it looks nice as well.
But problem start already with backwards compatibility with NetBios which limits the computer names to 15 characters.
Then comes the DNS which disallows quite a few characters including braces and parantheses.
So there's a reason for our horrible computer naming conventions I'm afraid. 
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This isn't SMB though at least what i'm doing**. As far as windows? If they were smart (and sometimes they are) they'd use the API to get 50 names at once and choose the 1st one that's less than 15 chars. Most of the names will be. Almost all of them.
** My stuff shows up when you "add a bluetooth device" under windows, or skip it and use my bluetooth capable app which doesn't require recent windows 10 to prepair devices. It also will show devices on the local network, right now using a custom multicast protocol but eventually probably using uPNP
Real programmers use butterflies
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Neat - how could you call the API using curl for example ?
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I forget curl syntax but it would be like
curl https://namey.muffinlabs.com/name.json?type=female[^]
As far as the parameters, type is gender. There are others but you'd have to go to namey.muffinlabs.com and hit the landing page, click on their JS API link and dig through the minified javascript you get back to find out what they are. sorry.
The default is to return a single first-name as a JSON array so like
["Sarah"]
I don't even use a JSON processor on it. Since names won't contain quotes i just do a string extraction for the bits between the quotes.
Real programmers use butterflies
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