Surely you have seen a CSS property and thought “Why?” For example:
Why doesn’t
z-indexwork on all elements, and why is it “-index” anyways?
Or:
Why do we need
interpolate-sizeto animate toauto?
You are not alone. CSS was born in 1996 (it can legally order a beer, you know!) and was initially considered a way to style documents; I don’t think anyone imagined everything CSS would be expected to do nearly 30 years later. If we had a time machine, many things would be done differently to match conventions or to make more sense. Heck, even the CSS Working Group admits to wanting a time-traveling contraption… in the specifications!
NOTE: If we had a time machine, this property wouldn’t need to exist.
CSS Values and Units Module Level 5, Section 10.4
If by some stroke of opportunity, I was given free rein to rename some things in CSS, a couple of ideas come to mind, but if you want more, you can find an ongoing list of mistakes made in CSS… by the CSS Working Group! Take, for example, background-repeat:
Not quite a mistake, because it was a reasonable default for the 90s, but it would be more helpful since then if
background-repeatdefaulted tono-repeat.Right now, people are questioning if CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid should share more syntax in light of the upcoming CSS Masonry layout specifications.
Why not fix them? Sadly, it isn’t as easy as fixing something. People already built their websites with these quirks in mind, and changing them would break those sites. Consider it technical debt.
This is why I think the CSS Working Group deserves an onslaught of praise. Designing new features that are immutable once shipped has to be a nerve-wracking experience that involves inexact science. It’s not that we haven’t seen the specifications change or evolve in the past — they most certainly have — but the value of getting things right the first time is a beast of burden.
The Mistakes of CSS originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
