I do see your point here, but in general, I think the responsibility for deciding what technologies work or don't work for a specific use case are ultimately up to the developer and not the author.
I did (as you noted) make sure to say "probably" or "often" and not "definitely" and always", because there's always something that won't work for someone, haha. I also tried to use the article tags to specify audience (you'll see it's tagged with #webdev, in line with your first point), and only include CSS features with mainline browser support (the 2-3 most recent versions of Chrome, FF, Edge, and Safari). In general, that means the percentage of folks who can use these will be high – but of course, never 100%. As someone who was an email dev for many years, I can tell you that most email devs know the state of the landscape pretty darn well, and wouldn't look at an article like this and assume that it would work in their context. I'm sure the same goes for devs who know their userbase has other limitations that inform their tech usage. I'll also throw out there that not everything listed in the article has the same level of browser support – someone who can't use the math functions may yet read this article and learn about vw or rem and be able to put those to use.
But, in the end, you're right – an informed decision can only be made by the developer who has the full context on the project. My hope with this post was just to prompt people to reconsider what they might have been doing purely out of habit, and possibly introduce them to a new bit of CSS they hadn't tried before.
And thank you for leaving a comment! I think the comments section is a great place for folks to call out and hash out these kinds of edge cases, so other newer devs who read the article can learn a little more about the process of making these kinds of informed choices about technology usage.
Some comments have been hidden by the post's author - find out more
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
I do see your point here, but in general, I think the responsibility for deciding what technologies work or don't work for a specific use case are ultimately up to the developer and not the author.
I did (as you noted) make sure to say "probably" or "often" and not "definitely" and always", because there's always something that won't work for someone, haha. I also tried to use the article tags to specify audience (you'll see it's tagged with #webdev, in line with your first point), and only include CSS features with mainline browser support (the 2-3 most recent versions of Chrome, FF, Edge, and Safari). In general, that means the percentage of folks who can use these will be high – but of course, never 100%. As someone who was an email dev for many years, I can tell you that most email devs know the state of the landscape pretty darn well, and wouldn't look at an article like this and assume that it would work in their context. I'm sure the same goes for devs who know their userbase has other limitations that inform their tech usage. I'll also throw out there that not everything listed in the article has the same level of browser support – someone who can't use the math functions may yet read this article and learn about
vworremand be able to put those to use.But, in the end, you're right – an informed decision can only be made by the developer who has the full context on the project. My hope with this post was just to prompt people to reconsider what they might have been doing purely out of habit, and possibly introduce them to a new bit of CSS they hadn't tried before.
And thank you for leaving a comment! I think the comments section is a great place for folks to call out and hash out these kinds of edge cases, so other newer devs who read the article can learn a little more about the process of making these kinds of informed choices about technology usage.