Why is CSS so Weird?

Because the web has been build with a set of value at it’s core : the web is open, it’s for everyone and everything. By accepting those value we must, at the same time, accept that we loose some degree of control, we don’t choose who will look at our website and on what devices. That lake of control means we must build websites for an infinite canvas with unknown constraints and capabilities. But designing for the unknown is hard, for that, we need flexibility, and this is where CSS come in.

The Cascade in Cascading Style Sheets is the process of assembling styles from different inputs. You gain from that process the capability to merge intent from different sources: the Author, the Browser and remarkably, the User.

It also allows us to fail gracefully by cascading upward wich is good for resilence and backward compatibility. But the tradeoff is that your instructions can be overridden, they became suggestions. This is one of the pitfalls of CCS and why we sometime have to use the infamous !important. The other consequence is that everything is hierarchically linked. This is great, as one style can be reused in many similar places to achieve consistency, but this is also another big pitfall of CSS as a style might impact elements it was never meant to.

Overall some might think that we made a bad tradeoff with CSS by loosing too much control, but I don’t think so. As John Allsopp said, “Control[…] is a limitation of the printed page”, when a book is produce and sold only the editor can make it accessible, and he fails to do it most of the time whether it’s diagrams with bad contrast or the absence of braille editions or other things. But with the browser and CSS the user has the last word, he can make it feet it’s need, whatever it is.’