Disappointed in the tone of the comments so far. Here's what I took from the article.
The author wasn't saying this was _good_, they were saying it was _interesting_. Professional curiosity and learning how a complex app uses CSS Grid (and Flexbox) at scale.
Indeed, their own conclusion was:
> That’s it for this exploration. I enjoyed looking at such unique and fun usage for both Flexbox and Grid. It’s inspiring to see that in a tool we’ll use, and for me, it inspired me to explore even more use cases for the CSS tools we’ve.
"Exploration", "fun usage", "inspiring". By all means come in with your preconceptions of Figma but nonetheless we should encourage this sort of analysis.
I have no particular love for Figma as a product but I'd guess there aren't many other examples of CSS Grid being used at such scale, as a critical path application for people whose job relies on it, with a relatively low adoption of CSS Grid, particularly to the extent they seem to have used it.
There's virtue Boring Tech, but let's encourage the inverse too.
Anyway, CSS could be considered a mess, especially for layout, but given its history, it's quite reasonable. I worked on something where every element had absolute positioning in the browser. That gives excellent control over the layout, but leads to all kinds of other issues. Flex and grid are two easily understood, productive solutions to the general problem, just not 'perfect'.
Sorry, by scale in this context I meant "used by a large number of users". Obviously there's no risk in CSS itself scaling - more that there's risk in using CSS Grid to the degree they have in a way I haven't seen in many web apps.
Maybe it means "automatically" (?). It seems like a bad excuse to have a tool automatically output bad CSS. If the CSS is not as good as written by an expert, then there should be a good reason for this like "theoretically impossible to know what the user wants from available specified info in the tool". Otherwise the tool is not doing such a good job.
There have been tools to output CSS forever. The only question is, whether output is appropriate. If it is a mess then it can only be used for fire-and-forget prototypes.
The author wasn't saying this was _good_, they were saying it was _interesting_. Professional curiosity and learning how a complex app uses CSS Grid (and Flexbox) at scale.
Indeed, their own conclusion was:
> That’s it for this exploration. I enjoyed looking at such unique and fun usage for both Flexbox and Grid. It’s inspiring to see that in a tool we’ll use, and for me, it inspired me to explore even more use cases for the CSS tools we’ve.
"Exploration", "fun usage", "inspiring". By all means come in with your preconceptions of Figma but nonetheless we should encourage this sort of analysis.
I have no particular love for Figma as a product but I'd guess there aren't many other examples of CSS Grid being used at such scale, as a critical path application for people whose job relies on it, with a relatively low adoption of CSS Grid, particularly to the extent they seem to have used it.
There's virtue Boring Tech, but let's encourage the inverse too.