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Hot take: a CSS drawing with zero divs is just as valid as one with 200 of them
Got into a heated argument at the Frontend Meetup in Austin last week about single element CSS art, and everyone acted like using one div with a bunch of box shadows was somehow cheating. I get the appeal of laying out 300 divs, but a single element forcing you to think in gradients and clip paths teaches way more about how CSS actually works. Anyone here actually prefer the single element approach, or am I the odd one out?
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logan_schmidt6d ago
The line about "forcing you to think in gradients and clip paths" is exactly right and I'd take it even further. When you only have one element, every visual trick has to come from the element itself, so you end up learning how background layers stack, how conic gradients can fake a pie chart, how border-radius can carve shapes out of a plain box. With 300 divs you can just brute force your way to a picture and never touch half of that stuff. The box shadow trick people call cheating is really just one more tool in that same toolbox, it's not somehow less pure than a div. I'd bet most folks who cry foul have never actually tried to build something with a single element. Once you do, you never look at backgrounds the same way again.
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