My Response To A Medium Page Rewrite Challenge : Part 1

I’ve been trying to explain to a number of people why I think this “slop classes at everything” approach, presentational classes, and host of other ways of coding a website are flawed if not outright half-assed junk. The poster child for these are the idiocy like BEM, Bootstrap and Tailwind — though other trash like React and Angular follow suit — where it is painfully obvious the CREATORS of these systems aren’t qualified to write a single line of HTML. As evidenced by their own examples.

Some people try to find a middle ground. When I criticized one such system called “molecular CSS” Joanna Borges Late suggested that we do a little one on one competition where we rewrite a Medium article page using the techniques we each favor.

Now her example:
https://javascript.plainenglish.io/rewriting-a-medium-webpage-by-hand-1-mb-becomes-90-kb-5f2df704a808

I still say is two to three times the code needed to do the job. It’s still harder to work with, harder to expand, change, or diagnose.

When I do these types of rewrites, I often don’t “leave well enough alone” because there are often things — font sizes, font-families, colour choices, and even some visual effects that I flat out would NEVER do in a design! That’s because I realize that design is more than…