Jason Knight
2 min readFeb 7, 2022

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BULLCOOKIES!

This sudden renaming of the broken PRESENTATIONAL classes to being "utility classes" does NOTHING to undo the fact the entire approach undoes 22+ years of progress, and reeks of the WORST of HTML 3.2 style development practices.

Slopping out two to ten times the HTML needed to do the job to avoid using HTML properly, is NOT the flipping answer. Particularly when that flips the bird at caching models (since HTML is cached less than an external stylesheet), accessibility (thanks to a screen only mentality in the markup), multiple media targets (since HTML is about MORE than what it looks like on screen), and in general violates the separation of concerns.

To think half-tweet nose-breathing idiocy like Failwind, Bootcrap, and so forth provide ANY advantages or improvements, or that there are less mentaly gymnastics using that chazerei is to be utterly devoid of understanding what HTML is, what CSS is for, and how to properly use either.

MAYBE if people stopped sleazing out 200k of HTML to do 20k's job, 500k or more CSS to do 48k or less' job, and megabytes of scripting on sites that might not even warrant the PRESENCE of JavaScript, maybe they wouldn't be suckered, hoodwinked, or otherwise bamboozled by the sheer ignorance, incompetence, and ineptitude this "utility class" BS brings to the table.

As I've said for a decade and a half, if you don't realize what's wrong with this train wreck of non-semantic gibberish:

<div class="p-6 max-w-sm mx-auto bg-white rounded-xl shadow-lg flex items-center space-x-4">
<div class="shrink-0">
<img class="h-12 w-12" src="/img/logo.svg" alt="ChitChat Logo">
</div>
<div>
<div class="text-xl font-medium text-black">ChitChat</div>
<p class="text-slate-500">You have a new message!</p>
</div>
</div>

doing the job of:

<section class="chatAlert icon_chitChat">
<h2>ChitChat</h2>
<p>You have a new message!</p>
</section>

You in all likelihood have no business writing HTML or CSS. Much less having the gall to try and tell others how to do so.

Which is why you're falling for nonsensical bloated sucker-bait like Failwind teaching you how NOT to use web technologies, and telling any users of your sites with accessibility needs to go plow themselves.

Because of course pissing extra PRESENTATIONAL classes into the markup recreating everything that was wrong with <font>, <center>, color=””, bgcolor=””, align=”” and so forth, mated to endless pointless DIV for nothing is the answer.

1997 called, it wants its markup back!

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Jason Knight
Jason Knight

Written by Jason Knight

Accessibility and Efficiency Consultant, Web Developer, Musician, and just general pain in the arse

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