On CSS Polyfills


I want to respond to "The Dark Side of Polyfilling CSS" by Philip Walton. At the end of the article is this hashtag:

#makecssfatigueathing

I disagree completely. Putting aside the fact that the word "fatigue" has only negative connotations, CSS is already different enough between browsers. If a CSS snippet's meaning can be changed at will by JavaScript, then:

Where does it end?? I strongly believe in the separation of concerns, and in using the right tool for the job. At what point does an application just ignore HTML/CSS and run entirely in JavaScript? (Yes, I'm sure it's already being done.) You might as well ship a desktop app if you're just using the browser as an execution environment.

The difficulty of polyfilling CSS should convince developers to write simple, backwards-compatible, and extensible CSS; not to make it more complicated.

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