The first S in CSS stands for “style.” Think colors and fonts, borders and shadows, rows and columns, animations and transitions. CSS is the programming language that makes a website look pretty (or pretty ugly, often). It’s what makes this very webpage look like itself—look WIRED.
One paragraph in, a certain reader will already be smarting at my description of CSS. “It’s a style sheet language,” I can hear them say, “not a programming language.” (The second S indeed stands for “sheets,” and the C, if anyone cares, for “cascading.”) Or, “it’s a domain-specific language, not a general-purpose language.” Also, “it doesn’t execute” and, of course, “it’s not Turing complete” (although … ). Granted, CSS is a little different. There’s no compile step, and it doesn’t throw errors at run time like other languages. But that’s all beside the point.
The gatekeeping over whether CSS is a “real” programming language exists partly because it’s so simple to start—anyone can grok “background: red” right away. But simple does not mean easy, as the programmer-writer Jeremy Keith observed, and calling CSS easy or unserious should be tired by now. There were about 50 properties in the initial CSS specification in 1996 (like “color” and “font-size”); today there are at least 10 times as many (get ready for “hanging-punctuation”). The language has changed so much in three decades, and by now it is just so capable. 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. 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.
I recently talked to a friend, a talented backend engineer, about this. In college, she got an internship at a reputable software company in San Francisco doing entirely backend work. “I’d never expressed any interest in frontend at all, almost to an extreme extent,” she told me. “I don’t like frontend.” And yet, when she joined the company full-time after graduation, she was immediately assigned … a frontend role. She eventually worked her way back to the backend, and by now she’s used to the skepticism. “I’ve been in a million and one conversations with the classic man engineer who doesn’t think I know what I’m talking about until they work with me for six months and see my first backend project.”