I didn't mean to suggest that you would work slowly. Your clients expect you to work with CSS, because it's the accepted solution, and anything else would be reckless. Within those constraints, CSS is a good solution -- circularly, though, because CSS is required by the constraints.
I work in web development, myself, though I haven't been doing it consistently through the years. It seems to be somewhat of a low-margin business, and the day-to-day challenges are mostly around producing reliable results within a budget. In that context, complaining about CSS is beside the point, because the day-to-day concern is doing CSS quickly and well, not replacing CSS with something entirely different. If styling became 5x faster overnight, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing for practitioners; just like it probably wasn't good for horse-related businesses when cars came along.*
*I'm not taking that analogy too seriously. I will not believe this new styling is a revolution until I see it.
> [...] the day-to-day concern is doing CSS quickly and well, not replacing CSS with something entirely different.
This exactly. I don't think we're ever actually going to get rid of CSS (probably not during my career at least), so I'm very interested in technologies like GSS that ultimately don't try to change the behavior of the browser - just the behavior of the developers.
> If styling became 5x faster overnight, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing for practitioners
I personally would love for styling to get 5x faster. There's be no reason for me to charge any less for the work, so that'd basically be 5x more dollars for the styling portion of any given project - however, styling already makes up a pretty low percentage of our projects' total spent time, so once again I'm pretty skeptical of anything that could reduce that.
Furthermore, I rarely do layout-related CSS to begin with: Bootstrap handles that pretty well, and most layout work beyond that is well within the capabilities of any intermediate developer.
I think that's the crux of the issue, really. Even though CSS is a subpar tool for doing layouts, the abstractions available today pretty much remove that pain: and CSS is quite good at the non-layout side of styling.
>>I'm very interested in technologies like GSS that ultimately don't try to change the behavior of the browser - just the behavior of the developers
To me, it's not fully clear exactly what parts of the process GSS is trying to change and what the full consequences of it would be. Even if I knew what it was _trying_ to change, I wouldn't necessarily make the assumption that the intended change would be the only change, or even the most salient change, that we as practitioners would actually have to live with. I have to look at something like this from every possible angle before I would trust any such claim, because, well... that's just what I do.
>>I personally would love for styling to get 5x faster. There's be no reason for me to charge any less for the work, so that'd basically be 5x more dollars for the styling portion of any given project
That would be great as long as it lasted, I'm sure. But, I expect that sooner or later, the secret will get out that websites just got faster and easier to develop, and your clients will start to expect to either pay less or get more for the same money. Even if your company doesn't charge by the hour, there's little doubt that some of your competitors are hourly. However it played out, economics is going to prevail, eventually.
I've been feeling some pain from CSS lately, which is definitely at least partly because there are newer tools and techniques available now that I still need to catch up on. My company has a guy who basically does nothing but handle the look of sites, and he ends up putting in some amount of time on practically every project we do. I have always thought of myself as a backend developer first and foremost, but CSS is hard to completely avoid.
>>and CSS is quite good at the non-layout side of styling
I don't know that I've heard it split into layout and non-layout before, but I'm assuming that non-layout is things like attaching colors and fonts to text, etc. CSS isn't bad for non-layout things, but, as far as I can tell, that is all of the easy stuff where there was no real engineering-type problem CSS had to solve, so, to screw that up, CSS would have needed to really work very, very hard at doing some inexplicably weird thing in order to have gotten that part wrong.
I work in web development, myself, though I haven't been doing it consistently through the years. It seems to be somewhat of a low-margin business, and the day-to-day challenges are mostly around producing reliable results within a budget. In that context, complaining about CSS is beside the point, because the day-to-day concern is doing CSS quickly and well, not replacing CSS with something entirely different. If styling became 5x faster overnight, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing for practitioners; just like it probably wasn't good for horse-related businesses when cars came along.*
*I'm not taking that analogy too seriously. I will not believe this new styling is a revolution until I see it.