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Discussion on: CSS and JS Are at War, Here’s How to Stop It

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Facundo Corradini

Some people are great at both things, but we still see lots of "mainly CSS devs" that simply can't / don't want to get into the JS heavy stuff, as well as "mostly JS devs" that are new to front end (either new to programming or coming from desktop / back end) that can't grasp the most basic CSS concepts.

But I don't they they are to blame. Sure, some have that "CSS is below me" attitude, but for the most part, the actually want to learn it, it's just that it gets really hard to find a decent source.

Most bootcamps, courses and resources out there barely burns through CSS from a "quick results" approach, sometimes even deferring to bootstrap, instead of teaching the core concepts.

CSS-in-JS is great, but it also allows this kinds of devs to mostly get away with it... until something fails and they bash CSS for their own flaws.
But the industry is in such a great demand for JS (mostly React) devs that they get really good jobs with great salaries anyway. Some companies proud themselves on "our designers make their own CSS", which is exactly just as wrong.

And that's the real issue right there. HTML, CSS, a11y and all that stuff requires a completely different skillset than "real programming", as well as different from "actual design". So most devs don't feel like CSS should be their responsibility, and neither do most designers.

JS is mostly about logical intelligence, HTML+CSS mostly about linguistics intelligence, and actual design (as in working with graphic tools) requires visual-spatial intelligence.

Some people are great at all of them, some at two of them, and some really shine in a particular one. But unless we start recognising the differences and respecting the role of whoever makes the HTML + CSS, we're gonna be stuck in this war.

That and actually providing decent sources for CSS learning, that get deep into the theory instead of pretending people to memorize a gazillion (and ever growing) set of properties