With modern frameworks, component libraries, and utility-first CSS, it’s a fair question.
Most frontend developers today rarely write “real” CSS. ...
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When you say “CSS might actually be the hardest part of frontend development. More complicated than JavaScript.” — I’m 100% with you. That’s exactly why I stick to backend as much as possible. I’m a perpetual perfectionist, so ready-made libraries don’t appeal to me, and writing everything from scratch in CSS is just a nightmare. Give me pasta — at least I know how to make that and feed a whole table! 😉
I totally get that 😄 I actually enjoy backend work too - but I always end up missing the visual part at the end.
If I ship just an API, there’s this little voice in my head going: “And… that’s it? Is this really the final result?” 😅
It’s been like that for me ever since I started programming. I need to see something at the end - even if it’s messy CSS and slightly broken layouts 😉
It’s not that I don’t want a visual result on my projects — sometimes I’m perfectly happy with a simple text visualization in a CLI — but the reality is I just prefer when someone else handles the front while I focus on the back. To each their own pleasure and specialty, and CSS is very, very far from mine 😉
That said, to come back to your original question: no, learning CSS is definitely not useless — far from it. I think things like WCAG standards make that pretty clear. It’s just that, for both of us maybe, it’s not really our core craft.
Who knows, maybe one day we’ll do a frontend–backend collab 😄
Just need to dig myself out of the thousand things I took on “because they were fun” first 😅
Hey, just say the word and you’re officially hired on the frontend side 😄 The door’s open anytime!
I’m still pretty new to web development, so this was reassuring to read. It’s helpful to see why CSS fundamentals still matter, even with all the tools and abstractions available now. Posts like this make me feel better about spending time learning the basics properly - thanks for sharing this perspective!
Absolutely - learning the basics is never wasted time. It pays off in ways that aren’t always obvious at first, but become incredibly valuable later on.
Good luck with your learning journey, and enjoy it! 😊
Thank you, Sylwia - really do appreciate it - back to CSS Garden and the like, I go!
You're right. Utility-first and component-based thinking is killing CSS and accessibility.
And because the world is riddled with things like Tailwind, people really need to know the basics so they can see when LLMs spit out junk.
I’d say abstractions and utilities are great tools - but they definitely don’t replace understanding the fundamentals.
When you know the basics, you can tell when something isn’t quite right - no matter whether it comes from a framework, a library, or a generator 🙂
This resonates a lot.
I don’t think CSS became irrelevant — it became invisible.
Frameworks and utilities didn’t remove the need for CSS, they just postponed the moment we’re forced to truly understand it.
Accessibility is that moment.
What really clicked for me in your post is that a11y breaks the “happy path abstraction”.
Once focus order, outlines, and keyboard navigation enter the picture, you’re no longer styling — you’re reasoning about layout, flow, and the cascade again.
And no utility class can replace that mental model.
Maybe CSS today is less about writing styles and more about debugging reality when abstractions leak.
In that sense, it feels closer to systems knowledge than UI polish.
Great write-up — especially the reminder that fundamentals don’t disappear, they just wait.
Thank you for this — you’ve put it perfectly. Exactly this.
And I completely agree: it’s not just about CSS. This pattern shows up with any abstraction or framework. They work beautifully until the moment they don’t — and that’s when the underlying fundamentals suddenly matter again.
Accessibility just has a very efficient way of exposing those cracks.
Another reason to keep learning CSS in 2026: one may actually need it in interviews if you plan to change jobs. I’ve recently taken part in a few recruitment processes that included testing assignments, and the CSS questions were surprisingly deep, everything from accessibility basics (like hiding elements from screen readers) to writing complex selectors (like selecting every odd div that’s a sibling of a div with class classOne, but not a descendant of a div with class classTwo). You were expected to remember all of this, with no external resources allowed. Kind of wild, right? 🙂
I honestly didn’t expect that! 😄 I’ve been through quite a lot of interviews in my career, and I don’t remember being seriously grilled on CSS even once.
But you’re absolutely right about accessibility - over the last few years it’s started being treated very seriously. Largely because of legal requirements, yes - but still, better that than being ignored.
I read the title and I was like...h u h:
I kept on reading and it makes sense. Never judge a post by the title lol.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: You are learning CSS regardless of if you are using Tailwind and such. For my projects, sometimes I go back to CSS even though I used bootstrap for my application because of getting small tweaks onto the webpage. I never really thought about accessibility until you mentioned it, which I found it interesting when you mentioned keyboard navigation.
I tend to think accessibility when it comes to HTML and JS. I treat CSS as just a "style" in a literal sense to make the webpage visually neat. I remember one of my courses taught CSS, but not as much to the point where our assignment in CSS is optional. I believe it should at least mention how important it is for accessibility since they failed to mention it.
I gave you a follow after a couple posts since you make great takes on the Development world! Awesome work!
That’s a great takeaway - and I really like your “short answer / long answer” framing 😄
You’re absolutely right that even when we use frameworks and utilities, we’re still learning CSS - just sometimes indirectly.
Accessibility is a really big deal, and it’s often underestimated. Roughly around 10% of web users have some form of disability, so these details genuinely matter. And CSS plays a bigger role there than many people expect - especially with focus states, visibility, and interaction feedback.
I’m really glad the post resonated with you - and thank you so much for the follow, that means a lot 💙
I could even center an element both vertically and horizontally — without Googling 😄 - that's so impressive, coz I still have to google that every friggin' single time I need it ... 😄😄😄
P.S. on a serious note - yes, I would think that learning CSS is still important, because it's the foundation - or am I something of a "dinosaur" already, haha?
Looks like we might both be dinosaurs then 🦖😄
But honestly, if knowing and valuing the foundations makes us dinosaurs, I’m perfectly fine with that!
Nice article! I can't even count how many times I've googled: How do I center an element both vertically and horizontally 😆
A true classic 😄 And it was especially painful back in the pre-Flexbox days.
Centering something vertically used to feel like solving a puzzle rather than writing CSS 😅
Try vertically centering an auto sized div in a div in IE6. It wasn't just hard, it was impossible - hence tables for layout, because you could vertically center content in a real
<td>element.CSS at the time had several methods for vertically centering such divs, but because of various bugs, none of them actually worked in IE6.
Thanks for the IE6 trauma reminder — I had almost managed to repress that memory 😅
Loved the read,
It really gave a time to rethink myself back:
Thanks for this wonderful article.
Thank you so much - I’m really glad it made you stop and reflect a bit 😊
And honestly, I won’t pretend it would be easy for me to switch back to pure, framework-free CSS either - I’ve gotten very used to the modern tooling. But it’s still a great skill to keep alive.
Honestly, I think Sylwia nails it. Learning CSS fundamentals is like having a superpower in debugging, especially when those frameworks and utils can only take you so far. It's the low-level magic that helps you reason about layout and flow. I've found the same fundamentals helpful in my own projects!
This hit hard. 😄 I looove frameworks. Back in the day, I'd let them solve the hard stuff -- for me? Give me two lat/lon points and I could get you from A to B via the shortest or fastest route, with a wine stop and no accidental drive-bys of your ex’s house.
But the moment something needed to line up on the screen, I was ready to smash my keyboard.
The accessibility angle is a great reminder that abstractions are amazing, until reality pokes through and you’re back in raw CSS land thinking, “where am I and how the hell did I get here?” (Surely there’s a Wizard of Oz joke in there somewhere? 😄)
Thanks for writing this; I feel seeeen! 😄
I personally, instead of completely relying on tailwind, use tailwind or css, stack scss on top as to add more powerful things, such as complex hover things. I know that tailwind says dont do it, but its easier than youd think.
omg girl I still looove writing CSS. I was late to the tailwind game and though I do appreciate it, I still like the control CSS gives me. Also, honestly, not a big fan of LLM generated styles and how they've looked for me. Maybe I'm not giving them the best prompts.
But yea, I recently learned about the clamp() and it makes typography so fluid and its awesome. Also, there's the new anchor positioning that's out and it makes things like tool tips much easier! (Remember how much a nightmare those were, oof).
"The Generational Gap"... 😂😂 its real!!
Id be happy if I never had to see CSS again. I had several projects with it in university and never really saw the point. Like writing in cursive... there are other ways to write.
I have just started my software engineering journey in frontend, and I will definitely not take CSS for granted.