HTML vs. CSS is a separation of technologies. If HTML was really only about the content and the CSS was only about styling, we wouldn't have to write div soups to style our websites (.container-wrapper .container .container-inner { /* "separation" */ }) and we wouldn't have to adjust our HTML when we change the layout.
Fine for a static site which is frozen at the first version forever.
So, so, painful for apps which need to change and evolve over time, which I'm currently experiencing. It's too easy to break the bits where you needed to get clever to make a layout variant work.
I did also did a Zen Garden on YouTube recently when they removed the list view option from Subscriptions, restyling their grid markup was a fun CSS exercise.
But for that designers should care about the limitations. But they don’t care. Not even about the more basic ones. I’m quite sure many of them don’t even know. Mainly, because their customers are not the one who code.
I got many designs for websites where customers told me that they want a pixel perfect version. The funniest one was when my boss who supposed to be a “senior” web developer told me this. Of course, there is no such thing on the web or really anywhere. Actually, I’ve never seen a design plan in which wildly different aspect ratios and sizes were really considered.
If the designer is not aware of the ins and outs of the medium they are supposedly working with, they are not a very well informed and educated designer.
Just like I don't presume to be able to make a great product packaging design, without knowing firstly much more about visual composition and design, but also secondly the material and form and shape I am designing for. Will that be a plastic wrapper, a paper wrapper or some cardboard packaging? Without knowing the limitations and properties of each, how can I expect to create a good design?
Being that uninformed to me seems like not giving a shit about the quality of work one delivers, ergo not giving a shit about ones job, or simply not having the required understanding or skill to be any good at ones job.
> not giving a shit about the quality of work one delivers
I’ve learned in the past decades that people who care about quality is the minority.
Look at any B2B software. They don’t care because their customers are different than who uses their products. They care about their customers only (managers). They pay attention to users as much as minimally possible without loosing customers.
CSS Zen Garden is quite the opposite of a good example of your point. Even small changes to the original page layout would completely break most of the provided styles.
If I removed the .page-wrapper class it would be also nearly impossible for a different developer to reverse-engineer the issue from the existing Template and CSS files.
The point isn't simply "class removal affects cascading", but "anything upstream is capable of placing the original content in an unrecoverable state".
Where "anything" could be your framework, your CMS, you or your coworkers a few years after the original CSS has been written and you can't fully remember what ".format-header__nav-wrapper:not(:last-child) .model-header__nav-wrapper:not(:last-child)" is doing.
And yes, that's a real CSS selector from a refactoring job I'm doing right now.
I find that most div soup is going away with CSS Grid. CSS Grid is often best when you lose wrappers and nesting. subgrid and display: contents help pop layers when you can't touch the HTML nesting, but now a lot of nesting feels unnecessary in the first place.
This actually blocks a lot more than just AI crawlers. You shouldn’t use this without reviewing it in detail so that you understand what you are actually blocking.
For instance, it includes ChatGPT-User. This is not a crawler. This is used when a ChatGPT user pastes a link in and asks ChatGPT about the contents of the page.
One of the entries is facebookexternalhit. When you share a link on Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, etc., this is the user-agent Meta uses to fetch the OpenGraph metadata to display things like the title and thumbnail.
Skimming through the list, I see a bunch of things like this. Not every non-browser fetch is an AI crawler!
> the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content;
It rather depends on the amount of content the RSS _author_ includes in the RSS feed. There's nothing in the RSS/Atom protocol that prevents you from reading the entire article, but some website creators decide to truncate the feed content.
My RSS reader of choice, InoReader, has the option to download the original website which solves the problem. However, I have over 200 feeds and it's rare to find one without the entire content being included.
I've analyzed the palette with my own tool, a11y-contrast[1], and indeed the luminance is not uniform. I wrote [2] about why this might be a desired property of a color palette.
Some RSS readers are quite aggressive with their polling time. At the same time, a single request may serve thousands of users. However, you can check your logs and get the actual number of subscribers, at least for popular RSS readers: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/
