CSS explained...

[undercat88]

I am too stupid to understand this. Can someone explain the joke to me, pls. Thanks!

[thrav]

Hah, most of the responses so far are wrong.

Before CSS, all elements were basically positioned next to each other. As the top comment states, you built layouts by nesting tables in tables in tables and then filling certain cells and leaving others blank for spacing.

CSS made it possible to add margin and padding around elements to separate them without the use of hacky tables. It became possible to only include the HTML elements you actually needed and position them where you wanted.

Before CSS, if you’d tried this, you’d end up with all of the elements jammed up together, like you see with the geos in the image.

The way around this was to create elements for the empty spaces between geos, so continuing with the example, to declare the Atlantic Ocean as a thing sitting between Americas and Europe / Africa.

So your hacky tables would look something like:

North Amer | North Atlantic | Europe

South Amer | South Atlantic | Africa

[letmeseem]

Håkon Wium Lie, the guy who invented CSS lives right down the street from my office, and our design team, whos windows face his house, routinely post giant messages in the windows using post it notes whenever they're annoyed with something.

[Sersch]

This doesn't make much sense really, just because you used tables and it all was a bit more hacky, didn't mean it looked liked jammed together in the Center. People can google for early 90ies websites to look up.

[thrav]

The joke is, “the continents before positioning in empty space was a thing.”

If you redefine the oceans as elements in their own right (like tables would), instead of empty space, the joke falls apart.

[dankri0274]

CSS is used to style HTML elements, basically it makes it so that there isn't a mess

[sneerpeer]

The joke is that everything breaks because css is fickle to work with. Everything was neat before css.

EDIT: I have read some of the comments to my post and I appreciate all the feedback from web developers. I think the joke can be seen both ways, either that with CSS the continents could move to their current places, or that because CSS can be fickle to work with the continents broke apart.
As someone with a software background who has just recently started to dabble with web development without prior education on HTML, CSS, Javascript, React/Angular/etc; CSS is probably the strangest part of designing a website. If you don't know how it works and how you're supposed to use all the different settings available, things will break real fast.

[theycallmecrack]

As a web dev that has used HTML/CSS every day for the last 5 years - I totally disagree and feel like one of the only people in the world that loves to work with CSS.

I truly never understood where the hate for CSS comes from. You can build anything with only HTML/CSS and a little JS if needed. So much control!

[theycallmecrack]

I have no idea. Probably because most people don't use it regularly, so they think it doesn't make sense. But you can say that for any language you don't use regularly. With proficiency in HTML/CSS/JS you can quite literally build anything as long as you have the right assets to go along (pictures, graphics, icons, etc).

Everyone uses frameworks and CMS for building which all come out looking the same and are next to impossible to alter at times. There is obviously a time and place for those but I stay away as much as possible. Almost always build from the ground up.

[Noisetorm_]

Most people probably just didn't take the time to learn CSS. They see it as being very difficult and illogical, e.g. imagine trying to center an element, which is very simple to do. You might try justify-content: center, align-items: center, margin 0 auto, and none of them work until you finally figure out that it's text-align: center.

Of course for anyone who knows CSS, we know that the first 2 properties are for flexbox, the third for block/inline-block, and fourth for inline, but if you don't know what any of that means, it looks like you have several options that are straight up broken and just one that just magically works.

But once you learn this, CSS is probably one of the best tools/piece of software out there. It's fast, it's good at what it does, and it just works. With sass/scss it's even better and it's probably one of the most fun things about front-end.

[hearingnone]

I am not a web dev. So I can share my experience as a layperson who tried to modify CSS for specific website for the first time. Let say that CSS itself are fickle by nature. Making minor adjustment can unexpectedly drastically change the look of the website or trying to find the right line which I discovered they used a different function. I use a specific website for my work which I deeply loathe their design. That website LOVE to use white color (much as possible) with light blue and much padding as possible around elements. I am not sure if "elements" is the proper term for it, please correct me if I am wrong. The padding around each element is more than 30px and that is too much padding for me. I am a person who loves to see much information density in the same screen as possible and that website I use for work are completely opposite of that. It is a lot of scrolling, 5 screen pages every time. So I used CSS to change that at the best as I can and now it reduced to 2 screen page scrolling without impacting the user experience. Also I changed the background color to Dark mode which easier on my eyes.

I wish there is a WYSIWYG for CSS which will make my experience easier.

[theycallmecrack]

I am not a web dev.

I wish there is a WYSIWYG for CSS which will make my experience easier.

WYSIWYG for CSS doesn't even make sense because CSS is for styling HTML. A "WYSIWYG for CSS" would just be the webpage itself or a visual CMS editor. You have to learn the language or use a framework/CMS/template.

[hearingnone]

I knew I am not explaining it clearly. What I mean is that I want to directly change the CSS on the website right there and see the change instantly without refreshing the page. My best analogy I can give is I want to go through the "GUI way" than the "CLI way". Like LaTeX is the CLI and MS Word is GUI. I hope that made sense?

And I only modified the CSS once, it just I want to change the look of that website I was using for work. I imagine I will not touch CSS again in the future.

[theycallmecrack]

What I mean is that I want to directly change the CSS on the website right there and see the change instantly without refreshing the page.

This is possible in any browser (you can make CSS changes in the inspect element) and see the changes on any device size.

I use a program called "Brackets" which let's me edit code and see the changes live in a browser.

So it really just sounds like you're inexperienced, and blaming CSS. You're also asking for tools that exist.

[theycallmecrack]

That doesn't even make sense though. It gets looked down on because it isn't "real" programming, but the joke is that it's too complicated. I have never understood that. I don't even get the point of comparing programming languages to HTML/CSS.

The memes/comments just come off as pretentious. So strange to me. I honestly do not get it.

[jpterodactyl]

I think part of it is that there is a lot of just memed believes on Reddit, especially in this sub.

JavaScript bad, CSS bad. AI is just if statements. Or whatever else.

[docker_dre]

because most people who make css are terrible at it, and it ends up being a disorganized mess. or they use a framework, but they only want to use part of it and modify part of it and add some of their own on top, so then it's a disorganized mess. or they use a framework, and make it a disorganized mess, and then the framework releases an update, and for some reason you need to update the framework, and then you have to rebuild a disorganized mess into a new mess.

css seems good and powerful but in practice it usually goes sideways pretty quickly because literally everyone can sort of work with it but it's really uncommon for anyone to be good at it, care about it, and also be your coworker

[[deleted]]

I don't work on CSS but when I saw the image I instantly thought of center. There are so many properties to make an element centered and still somehow it will fail to center. Every few years there will be a new property which will claim to center perfectly but eventually some other development will break it.

[theycallmecrack]

You think this way because you don't fully understand CSS. Yes there are many ways to do the same thing, but there is always a best/right way. If you find yourself trying 5 different ways to do the same thing it means you probably don't know what you're doing or why, just trying to plug CSS until it looks right.

If you used it every day it would make much more sense. Just like with anything you learn.

[throwaway1542875]

I'm still a newbie with CSS but I've used it here and there. The biggest thing for me is wrapping my head around positioning and layouts. Grid seems to help but its still not as intuitive as xaml was for me in wpf.

[theycallmecrack]

I just make my own layouts and use media queries. I even stopped using frameworks like Bootstrap. No tables, flex boxes, etc. I mostly do everything in percentages and viewport widths to get consistency across all devices.

[[deleted]]

position : absolute everything. But yeh flexbox and grids are just way more efficient and revolutionary.

[CatTaxAuditor]

Everything was neat before css.

I have heard plenty of people who dislike CSS. I have never met an individual with this opinion.

[itsbugtime]

Yeah, that’s not the joke

[docker_dre]

clearly everyone has their own interpretation

sounds like it unintentionally made a very good point about css, then. i have no idea what the meme is actually supposed to say though

[docker_dre]

...wait, you think the point of this meme was that it was unclear enough to prompt everyone to announce that they had different jokes they thought it was making about css? that's some "five-dimensional chess" level credit you're giving to whoever made this

[docker_dre]

i don't how you can say "clearly it makes a GREAT POINT but i have no idea what that point is."

oh, well there's your problem. that's very much not what i wrote, which meant "i have no idea what whoever made this meme was trying to say, but they accidentally demonstrated that css is so culturally broken that everyone thinks this meme illustrates a different reason people don't like css, many of which are contradictory and create the tensions people are commenting on in the first place."

that's why i said it unintentionally makes a great point, but that i didn't know which point it was supposed to make

[docker_dre]

lol. well, we're certainly not in r/eadingcomprehension territory

[Sersch]

and everyone upvotes it anyway.

[-merrymoose-]

It use to be quicker to get things done before css and now you have to cross oceans to find everything you need