Stylesheets and me

So as it turns out, I’m pretty terrible at styling rich text. I can definitely do reasonably intuitive form controls, but I only did the layouting here— the actual CSS to make things genuinely pretty was written by a friend.

Well, I’m not the worst, actually? In one of the advocacy groups I’m involved in, we have several websites that look like they were last updated in 2004, and one notable site (for the backend subgroup that runs literally all our infrastructure) with literally no styling whatsoever. Just raw HTML. This is the legacy of nerds who grew up relying on TeX to make things pretty for them, I think.

Still, I’m pretty terrible at CSS! As of writing of this page, the styling of this page is pretty much as bare-bones as it can be without being literally CSSless. Building out a stylesheet that’s sensible and pretty takes time and brainpower that I don’t have to spare these days, anyway– It’s not even that I don’t have color schemes I like, just that I have to invest so much time and effort into making them visible and legible in a way that’s sensible. And also that CSS is a nightmare spec that simultaneously gives you way too many tools (for describing basic atoms) and way too few (for combining them in sensible ways into reasonable skeumorphisms or aesthetics).

Also, the minimalist “everything is sleek and flat and bubbly and beveled and sometimes has a strongly colored border” may have been futuristic and avant-garde years ago, but at this point it’s just gauche. The consequences of Material UI blah blah blah

If you know any competent CSS stylists please send them my way. Halp meh.