Negotiating with CSS — Anselm Hannemann

Skip to content

I have open capacity for freelance work starting August 2026.<br>· Get in touch

Me: "Center this div."<br>CSS: "No."<br>Me: "display: flex;"<br>CSS: "Still no."<br>Me: "justify-content: center;<br>align-items: center;"<br>CSS: "Interesting... but also no." 😭

At some point you stop writing CSS...<br>...and start negotiating with it.

I like the statement "negotiating with CSS" because that’s the idea behind the web. We negotiate with the browser, or, let’s say the user’s device.<br>CSS makes this more obvious, JavaScript less so. Developer abstractions like Frameworks, TypeScript and others are misleading here since they still have do this internally but give devs the assumption it may not be needed.<br>Hence, we’ve seen a massive neglection of this principle: Progressive enhancement, graceful degradation are not used anymore in many web services.<br>⠗⠎ Remy Sharp wrote a great piece on it this week as well.<br>If you understand how browsers work, how CSS methods work (box sizing, object model), calculate, centering items is not much easier, but you know how to achieve centering items in which situation. You negotiate your visual product goal with web technologies. No praying, no "div magic" needed.<br>✅ Know your craft.<br>✅ Inspect and test early, often, always.<br>✅ Live progressive enhancement, stop building static software artifacts for the web. Your users will thank you!

Now that you realized someone knowing their craft (frontend) is what you really need for your company or product, you can send me a mail and discuss the matter with me.<br>As a freelancer, I have helped dozens of companies achieving their goals, improving frontend quality and reliability and scaled their products and teams or made them accessible and fast.

External content

This site can load optional external content (for example Cal.eu booking and YouTube embeds). That may set third-party cookies. Essential services such as Cloudflare Turnstile for the contact form are not covered by this choice.

Accept external content

Decline

Privacy policy

Prefer a call? Book 20 minutes

Prefer email?

Tell me a bit about your project or question. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Name

Email

Subject

Message

Send message

Open in email app instead

Booking loads Cal.eu. Allow external content to use the calendar here, or open it in a new tab.

Allow external content

Open calendar in a new tab

Open calendar in a new tab