Unpopular take: CSS frameworks are holding juniors back more than they help

Last week I was helping a new dev debug a layout at a meetup in Portland. She had been using Tailwind for 6 months and couldn't explain how flex-basis works under the hood. Three years ago when I was learning, I spent 2 weeks straight writing layouts with only vanilla CSS and floats. It was painful but I actually understand box model now. Are we making things too easy too fast?

2 comments

2 Comments

wren30121h ago

Floats were brutal but I learned more in those two weeks than six months with any framework.

val_taylor21h agoTop Commenter

Gotta push back on this one a bit. Floats felt more like a test of patience than actual learning to me. I spent so much time fighting with layout issues and browser quirks that I barely had time to think about design or user experience. CSS frameworks might hold your hand too much sometimes, but at least they let you focus on building stuff that works instead of wrestling with margins and clears. The flaky support across browsers back then made it even worse, you'd finally get something looking right in Chrome and then check Firefox and everything would be a mess. I get that you have to understand the basics, but I think we romanticize how useful that struggle actually was.