ALT One programmer recently re-created Doom in CSS. Others have used it to build holographic Pokémon cards and 3D-rendering engines. Cassidy Williams, who competed in this year’s inaugural March MadCSS tournament, built an experimental database-query engine entirely in CSS. When she demo’d it at Microsoft Build, even the emcees—seasoned programmers themselves—took a cheap shot at CSS. “You’re one of the people that likes it,” they snarked. “You might be the only one.” Why is the lore of JavaScript’s creation so famous (Brendan Eich, Netscape, 10 days) and yet hardly any programmer would recognize the name of CSS creator Håkon Wium Lie? It might have something to do with Lie being a Norwegian guy with a diacritic in his name, not an American in Silicon Valley like Eich nor a Brit like Tim Berners-Lee, who invented HTML.
ALT And to be fair, JavaScript and HTML each have a chip on their own shoulder to worry about. But in the browser’s holy ternary of JavaScript-HTML-CSS, people tend to treat CSS as less than or purely decorative. Styling can be decorative—and wonderfully so—but the legibility and rich design it affords are important. People care how things look! There’s another, uglier explanation for the CSS disrespect: It’s considered a “feminine” language. CSS developers work on the frontend—the part of a website you can actually see. There’s the obvious undertone that dealing with style and beauty is Female Work, along with the recycled joke that a CSS developer is “a freak in the style sheets.” How seriously a language is taken has knock-on effects on programmer salaries, what skills are sought out and tested in job interviews, and how accessible websites are for people with disabilities.
ALT The Washington Post: Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’
ALT The Independent: AI shopping app found to be actually powered by Philippines call centre workers
ALT Pyramid of sexual violence. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Pyramid-of-sexual-violence_fig1_373926855
ALT Good men spectrum by Sarah Niven @coinswallow. https://www.instagram.com/p/C6saLSfgL0R/
ALT screenshot of last.fm playback, favourite time to listen slide.
