Developer Round Table - Why Do We Still Dismiss CSS?

You know what’s weird? CSS is everywhere, pretty much on every website and yet, there’s this attitude about CSS that persists that it doesn’t need to be taken seriously; it’s just icing on a cake. Casey brought this up at a Developer Round Table discussion, and it hit home. There’s this vibe that CSS is just… weird, or “not real code.” And I get it, a lot of us lived through the ‘try it in every browser and pray it works’ era. It was rough.

But honestly, those days are mostly gone. With Flexbox, grid, and modern tooling, styling is smoother than ever. But still, the reputation lingers.

So what’s our responsibility as web folks? Just hand-wave and blame the language? Or dig in and treat CSS with the respect it deserves?

On a certain level, it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. This was a thought brought up by Max, a developer at Flagrant. If you believe from the start that CSS is a lost cause, you’re never going to bother learning it well. You limp through, hate every second, and when it breaks, you get to say “Told you it was bad.” Which isn’t fair to the language to label it as difficult or broken just because you didn’t bother to truly understand how it works.

Part of the problem might be that CSS hasn’t had the same level of tooling and support other languages enjoy. In Ruby, Java, or JavaScript, your editor catches errors, helps autocomplete methods, points out typos, it’s a conversation. But with CSS, it’s often silent. No nudges, no suggestions, just… hope for the best.

But maybe that’s also on us.

As Casey pointed out, there’s a chicken-and-egg situation happening. We don’t take CSS seriously, so the tooling hasn’t caught up, and because the tooling hasn’t caught up, we don’t take it seriously.

That’s slowly starting to change. Visual regression testing, design linting tools, better devtools, the ecosystem is maturing. But it’ll only keep improving if we demand more of it and invest time into it.

This brings me to the heart of it: why do we dismiss CSS in the first place?

CSS isn’t just about making things “pretty.” It’s about creating a usable, intuitive experience. If you’ve ever visited a site that felt frustrating or clunky, buttons too small, text hard to read, weird layout, you know exactly how much design and styling matter. A beautifully engineered backend doesn’t mean much if the frontend makes users want to leave.

Styling is functionality. And yet, we treat it like decoration.

We also discussed how design has historically been a more female-dominated discipline. And we know, historically, that female-dominated fields tend to get dismissed or undervalued. That bias, even if it’s unconscious or unintentional, might be part of why CSS and design work often aren’t given the same technical respect.

I’m not saying developers are intentionally dismissive or malicious. But it’s worth examining how our own biases, whether personal or systemic, shape the way we value different kinds of work. If we want to grow as developers, and as a community, we have to be willing to question these patterns.

What would happen if we approached CSS as an equal partner in the stack?

We’d probably write better code. We’d build better tools. We’d create better experiences for users, and maybe we’d start to close some of the gaps in respect and recognition within our teams and communities.

Because in the end, CSS isn’t just how things look, it’s how things feel. And that deserves just as much care and craft as any other part of the web.

Let’s stop treating CSS like an afterthought. Let’s build with it like it matters, because it does.

If you’re looking for a team to help you discover the right thing to build and help you build it, get in touch.