Samantha's Ramblings

I am a HUGE fan of CSS. I don't always make my sites look pretty (just look at my latest creation at wordle.barrybenson.dev ), but the thing is CSS is fan-freaking-tastic. I have my issues with Tailwind,  but even that can do the vast majority of what CSS can do, and I love it. New CSS features like "if()" and custom properties are game changers. What isn't a game changer, to me, is the new "color-mix()" function. From a purely functional standpoint, the color-mix() function is actually pretty dope. If you want to use it, I have a good video from Kevin Powell for you to watch below this paragraph. Even having watched this video, however, I don't get it. I just don't. From a functional standpoint, it can do a lot of good things, but from a design to implementation standpoint... it is the most useless CSS feature we've had come out in the last five years. Introducing a book titled Refactoring UI, by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger of TailwindCSS fame...

This month has been great for my stupid ideas to flow. Highdeas as I call them because I am usually (like right now) high while I come up with them. These ideas are too stupid, or I myself am too stupid, to work on them, so I thought I'd share these ideas with the world. 1: Yet Another Generic/User-Friendly Arch Distro (YAGAD/YAUFAD) The TL;DR of this project is just to build another Arch-based distribution just to see how far I can take it. With the failure of my management of Illumarine, a much more complex project, I thought maybe I could do something like this and get something done. Basically it's a generic Arch install with a bunch of default apps, a simple and easy GUI like KDE and/or GNOME, and some generic installation tool. 2: A crappy Linux installer written in Electron A simple plug-and play, easy to modify and stylize system installer for Linux written in Electron, or Tauri, whichever suits your boat. 3: An Electron alternative based on Bun and modern WebKit The id...

No doubt is Tailwind a useful tool, especially for prototyping, but ultimately I feel as if it promotes terrible developer practices with flimsy, half-baked, ideologies powering its design. Ultimately I am not here to tell you that you're wrong for using TailwindCSS, use whatever tools make your life easier. But I care a lot about the tiny optimizations one can make to build better styles for the web, and here are my findings. NOTE: This is more of a ramble than anything else. Adam Wathan's (in)Famous Blog Article Adam Wathan wrote an article (that I just need to rant about for just a moment) titled  CSS Utility Classes and "Separation of Concerns" , and before even clicking the article itself,  on the list of articles , Adam describes the article as  Why “separation of concerns” is the wrong way to think about CSS and why presentational classes scale better than semantic classes.  I strongly disagree that separation of concerns is the wrong way to think about CSS. C...