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Why doesn't everyone use this yet?!
711 Plays5 months ago
My newsletter: https://www.kevinpowell.co/newsletter/
The post by Chris that I mention: https://frontendmasters.com/blog/weve-got-container-queries-now-but-are-we-actually-using-them/
In this podcast episode I discuss how he's come to realize that not everyone is as entrenched into the world of CSS as I am, and wonder a little bit about how to raise the general awareness of new features.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'General Musings'
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, my friend and friends, and welcome to my podcast, General Musings. My name is Kevin, and here at this podcast, I generally talk about whatever is front of mind for me in any given week in some way that is related to front-end development.
Developer Bubbles & Container Queries
00:00:13
Speaker
And this week, I want to talk a little bit about the bubbles that we place ourselves in when it comes to front-end development. Because as I was talking about in my newsletter this week, I mentioned an article that was by Chris Coyer over on the Frontend Masters Boost blog, where he was talking about container queries and just how
00:00:29
Speaker
It seems like nobody's using them, even though it's this feature that everyone was really excited about, and it seemed like everyone was talking about it.
The Gap in Adoption and Awareness of Container Queries
00:00:35
Speaker
And then, like Chris said, the adoption for it didn't pick up maybe as fast as we thought, but in asking my audience, and I remember, you know, Carvitz had done a previous blog where she'd asked her audience,
00:00:46
Speaker
Like the majority of the people who follow us and are in my audience and Eunice audience are very CSS see audiences The majority of the answers were from people who didn't know what container queries are Which is like what everybody knows what these are we're super excited about them, right?
CSS Knowledge: Expert vs. Audience
00:01:06
Speaker
It makes you wonder a little bit like we're not wonder but I'm in this boat where I have to remember
00:01:13
Speaker
All the time that people aren't as entrenched in these things as I am And it's a little bit different if I'm teaching like beginners because I can sort of put myself in the frame of mind of a beginner I've worked with a lot of people that have never written code So I find on that front I sort of I'm pretty good at like filling in all the blanks where I'm assuming no knowledge But once I assume somebody knows what they're doing with CSS there's lots of these small things that
00:01:41
Speaker
you assume people know about that it turns out they don't and it's hard to know like where those lines are because I'll be talking with people like Adam Argyle and we're just chatting away on stuff and you know he knows even more about CSS than I do and his knowledge is really deep on it and then I'll be reading blog posts from people like Stephanie Eccles or chatting with Amit Sheen and like all these other people who are just very in the same CSS world as I am
00:02:07
Speaker
And of course we know about all of these things that are going on, right? A bunch of people sit on like the CSS Next panel that they get together and talk about what's the future of CSS. So we just sort of need to know about what the current state of it is to talk about the future of it. But the reality is most people aren't doing any of
Hobby Knowledge vs. Professional Knowledge
00:02:25
Speaker
that.
00:02:25
Speaker
Right? Which is, I guess, why my channel is successful is because people want to be like, oh, how do I do this? Or what are the new features that are going on? Or how do this I've heard about this other thing and I want to see how it works and stuff like that. So you're discovering these things. But it's it's a little bit with like the pace of change, especially these days with CSS growing so quickly for me keeping up with everything, but then also just being aware of like where is
00:02:51
Speaker
the quote-unquote normal developer at, right? Someone who just doesn't read about CSS all day long and doesn't keep up with all the changes that are happening. What are they familiar with and what are they not familiar with and where, you know, there's gonna be some sort of gray zone there where some people are more familiar with certain things than others. But it's just, it's one of those things where I think it's very hard. Once you get past that beginner stage where you're assuming no knowledge,
00:03:16
Speaker
to sort of, for me to put myself in the shoes of other people and relate to where they are in terms of certain understandings of just what is possible in CSS. And obviously this is me talking about CSS specifically in my own place because that's where I'm very, you know, that's what I know a lot about. That's my niche. And so this is obviously something that can happen to anybody in anything they have a very deep knowledge of.
Learning Curves in Rock Climbing and Photoshop
00:03:42
Speaker
But I think with some things, it's a little bit different
00:03:46
Speaker
if it's like a hobby or something else because for a lot of things we often know either very little or we know a lot, right? Because say it's a hobby, just for an example I'm getting into rock climbing now or more specifically bouldering which is like rock climbing where you don't use any harnesses or anything because you're not climbing as high like you fall it's on cushion mats and you're not falling from high enough that you're going to hurt yourself
00:04:11
Speaker
So I'm getting into that now and it goes from being this thing where, you know, you've either never done it and you know nothing or you start getting into it and you'll have that like phase where you're learning more about it because there's, you know, specific technology, there's the equipment, there's other things that you sort of need to learn about.
00:04:28
Speaker
And even like all the different rocks that you're grabbing onto or you know, they're not real rocks I'm doing at an indoor gym So it's like the the fake rocks that are drilled into the wall But there's different shapes to them and they all have different names for the different types of shapes that you can get Right with like weird things that you wouldn't really expect So that it's very jargony, right? and so like if somebody's not into that world you're not going to know any of the jargon and then once you get into it and
00:04:54
Speaker
maybe at the very beginning you're just sort of getting your feet wet with it but if you decide to get into it you're gonna learn all that jargon really quickly because it's things that are important and like I won't be as good as the best people that are there and they're gonna know better techniques and they're gonna know how to do the different things better to make it easier for them to climb and they're gonna be stronger than me because they've been climbing for a long time and all of that
00:05:15
Speaker
but like you sort of get entrenched into that thing relatively quickly and there's obviously extremes in there but you sort of get into that world if it's something you're interested in or maybe that's just me and how I do things I sort of like diving deep and understanding the stuff I'm doing I don't know maybe I'm wrong on that but that's how I see things anyway and again maybe that's just because I'm looking at it from my own point of view and how I see things but anyway
00:05:39
Speaker
It's all just to say like on these things that are more like hobbies that people either won't do or get very much into, I feel like there's more of that dichotomy where you either know nothing or you know at least quite a bit about it.
Keeping Up with CSS Changes
00:05:53
Speaker
Whereas when it's something that's like part of your job but you're not doing all the time, it's a little bit different, right? Like at one of my jobs I had to use Photoshop for stuff and it wasn't something I needed to use intensively but I had to go into Photoshop and do a few things
00:06:08
Speaker
And I enjoyed Photoshop. I've been playing with Photoshop since I was in high school. There's a lot of stuff in there and crazy things people can do that I have no idea how they do it. And there's features in there that I don't understand and there's all these things I don't do because it's not something I sit down and do all the time. Especially now that I don't do as much with Photoshop as I used to. It used to be I was sort of more into that and now I only use it to make my thumbnails. And so like I don't need to know it as well as I used to. And there's new features that have come out that enable things to be
00:06:36
Speaker
Easier to do and I'm not keeping up with those who cares I have my little workflow that I do and I just do those Simple things and I know these five features that I need and that's it right and I think that's more of like how people are Often with CSS they don't need to know all of these things that I'm talking about all the time And I'm super entrenched into
00:06:56
Speaker
they're writing JavaScript all day long and then they just need to do a few things with CSS and they go back to the old familiar things they did and then they hear about oh there's a container query okay I don't whatever what I'm doing works why should I care all right and so it's just like it's this interesting thing where when it's something that we sort of need but not
00:07:15
Speaker
all the time, and even if you're doing quite a lot of CSS, if you're doing it as a job, you're probably not on the cutting edge all the time, because that doesn't serve your purpose, because the browser support's not good enough, and you have to get the job done. So you're not learning new things all the time, you're often just following the flow of where things are going, and then hopefully watching my videos or other things where you might get, oh, I could do that instead, and that's going to be easier, faster, more performant, or whatever it is.
Improving CSS Education & Marketing Strategy
00:07:39
Speaker
Or it's a better practice, but you know It's it's such a different thing from like being in that learning stage and and diving into something That's like optional and something you want to know a lot about Versus here's this thing I have to use and I'm just gonna use the parts of it I can or here's this thing that I actually enjoy maybe you like writing CSS But you just don't have the time to dive deep into that world You just need to get your jobs finished and then the day is over and you don't want to be thinking about CSS in the evening You want to go?
00:08:06
Speaker
rock climbing or play video games or whatever else it is that you want to do. Yeah, anyway, this turned into a much longer ramble than I intended. I don't really have a conclusion to make here other than like I am seriously thinking about like how do we get the education of the current state of CSS more widespread because it honestly surprises me that so many people like over 50% of my audience doesn't know what a container query is.
00:08:32
Speaker
and I know my audience split in terms of experience and the beginner split isn't big enough to say like, oh that makes sense. And it's even why in a recent video I was going to do one just on container queries and I ended up doing a video on like container queries and media queries or the other way around with let's talk about media queries and container queries because I'm like if a beginner comes along now they should be learning both. These are two things that do similar jobs but they're a little bit different so I want to introduce both of them
00:08:59
Speaker
the similarities between them but also the differences between them so a beginner would know them but anyway I know it's one of the things that they're wanting to do with the idea of CSS4 and CSS5 and bringing these levels in to sort of to CSS3 was this exciting time when all this new stuff came out and people got very excited
00:09:15
Speaker
They want to do that again in terms of a marketing thing to let people know about all these new things that are there, but also to make these chunks like, oh, there's a CSS4 and here's the things that are in there and somebody can look at a list and be like, oh, there's all these things I can do now, and then there's a CSS5. I won't touch that yet because browser support for those things isn't good enough or whatever it is, but I'm aware that they exist and that type of thing. I used to not like that idea as just this marketing thing, but now I'm seeing more and more, I think, why that's coming around.
Conclusion & Upcoming Interview Teaser
00:09:45
Speaker
I'm just wondering, in general, like my job is to teach people about CSS, so I need to find more ways to sort of, you know, get people wanting to learn these new things, I guess. I don't know. I'm not sure where these thoughts are going. If you have any ideas, reach out to me on social media. Send me a DM or just at me. I'm on Mastodon and on Twitter, so you can message me on wherever you want if you have any ideas on those.
00:10:08
Speaker
But yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode, even if it was a little bit of a ramble. Next week I'm gonna have an interview with Clark Sell, who you probably don't know his name, though maybe you do. And if you don't, something to look forward to is a very good talk on a few different topics that I think you'll be interested in. I won't spoil too much right now. The interview's already been done a little while ago, but it needs to be edited up. But yeah, that'll be out next week and...
00:10:31
Speaker
I guess that's it for now. Thank you so much for listening, and until next time, don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome.