CSS is hard because it solves hard problems – disassociated.com
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CSS is hard because it solves hard problems
18 May 2026
18 May 2026
Julie Evans recently re-wrote her website’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and took the fight to the stylesheet language as it were:
So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to "CSS is hard" by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything for me: I learned that so many of my frustrations ("centering is impossible") had been addressed in CSS a long time ago, and that also what "centering" means is not always straightforward and it makes sense that there are many ways to do it. CSS is hard because it’s solving a hard problem!
Oh, the fun, and untold lost hours, trying to centre something, without breaking the page layout.
But I would like to delve more deeply into CSS, because the language has become many hundreds of times more vast than when I starting working with it in the late 1990’s.
The last time I came close to doing any heavy lifting was four years ago, when I completely rewrote the HTML and CSS here. As ever though, I was working to do the job as quickly as possible, so I could get back to writing content here, day job, everything else there is to do, etc.
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