Really? I started out doing CSS, and I still love it 10 years later. Sure, it has its quirks, but now that we have tools like SASS, it makes CSS so much more fun all over again.
SASS and LESS provide really nice language improvements, but they don't fix all the crap about box models and positioning and polyfills and byzantine precedence rules and the necessity for silly hacks like this. It's just too complicated and painful to make things look the way you want them to look, which is the point of CSS. I've gotten pretty good at it and I've come to care a lot about how it works (e.g. this little visualization is a really nice demonstration), but this state of affairs saddens me; I wish I could concentrate on other stuff, and not how to make a goddamn triangle.
(At some level of technical hair-splitting, this isn't per-se CSS's fault and is more general DOM crapiness, but that distinction is largely irrelevant. They're still problems I'm expected to solve with CSS.)
I'm with you. Anyone who says CSS is A-OK doesnt understand it fully or doesnt have the imagination for something better to replace it. It's really the most shite language I've ever had to deal with.
That's the thing though, we have to deal with it. I don't get why there isn't just a complete replacement trending on HN every other month. Sure, it needs browser support and it would forgo a lot of the CSS-specific optimizations baked into the browsers but there has to be a more efficient way to handle the DOM.
I think CSS is A-OK and I believe I understand it fully as I've been using it for most of my career. Most of its "problems" are rooted in bad implementations in browsers or people trying to use it for things it wasn't designed for, not in the spec itself.
But maybe I think this because I don't view it as a language, to me it's more of a configuration file that holds sets of instructions. It's getting closer to a proper language though.
You can have your opinion I suppose, but nearly every web tech I've worked with over the years has had its transitions from good to bad to hated only to end up somehow good again.
