I spent waaay too long trying to figure out why my CSS rule didn't work. It doesn't accept me to overwrite an already existing one. The rules did not specify this at all.
It is not clear that the game wants me to find another rule that fixes the problem instead of adding a single perfectly valid line of CSS that does it. There is a huge difference between those two. CSS being cascading meaning that any CSS property coming after an initial rule will overwrite the previous one (in part or fully).
It would be really nice if the game would tell me if the rule I added wasn't allowed instead of just silently failing to do anything with no feedback.
Same, because of the lack of feedback I genuinely thought it didn't work. Especially considering the fact many editing things don't work (double click doesn't select, cmd+(shift+)arrows doesn't work, etc.)
You can still play that way if you want. Just open your browser's dev tools and edit the CSS rules inside the dev tools. Once you have them overlapping, you just need to do something to trigger the victory check which can be accomplished by doing basically anything (resize the window, click on a circle, type something, I haven't found any action that doesn't trigger the victory check yet).
I thought the site was broken for the exact same reason. Instead of being a troubleshooting / practice type test it's more of a puzzle that I do not care to solve.
It's a perfect representation of CSS: it looks and feels like it should do what you need, but it doesn't _technically_ do what it's supposed to do, so you spend a few hours _trying_ to make sense of it, falling back to just random fuzzing and trial and error, before concluding it's all broken and finally accepting it in its current wonky form, trusting that in some browser, somewhere, it works.
I'm pretty good at handling the cascade and knowing how things work, so this experience you are describing is not mine where CSS is concerned, I doubt I've had to do several hours of trying to make sense of any CSS for probably 5-6 years.
As such that the game does not actually allow you to use the cascade as it should be used is a downside.
It must be maddening working as a browser dev knowing that the very first thing most devs worth their corn do is immediately go to abstracts so they are able ignore your work as much as they can.
Doesn't work on my phone on this site—it's detecting the viewport size, and even in landscape with desktop page mode turned on the site refuses to show anything.
Tried that on some service promoted here yesterday, they still figured out I was on Android and kept blocking me. Happens rather often, actually.
I find it convenient to do both some programming and exploring documentation and new technologies on a tablet, and just discard those that don't allow me to. If you're selling to computer professionals you shouldn't try to preempt the expected problem of customers complaining that your services don't render right on a small iPhone.
I started the SolidJS tutorial on my iPhone this morning. Was impressed that it worked at all, but I couldn’t find a way to copy & paste, and switched to my MacBook. Better than giving up I guess…
Yes exactly - usually in Artifacts, which I then copy and paste into the GitHub web editor in order to ship them via GitHub Pages to https://tools.simonwillison.net/
Depends what you call tiny. I've only found one "tiny" phone (that is, a normal smartphone size ten years ago) with a modern chipset (so I don't need to replace it in <=3 years) and that's the Jelly Max... but it's only purchasable directly from China and their warranty page is broken so I don't want to throw my coins into a slot machine. Can't find even a single other model, no matter the price. Xperia 5 V comes close but is only available second hand; Xperia 10 VI has a pretty slow SoC. Everything else is a size that people amusedly called "phablet", or was literally a tablet
Phones are definitely usable as desktops nowadays, especially if you stick it in a cardboard and can actually see (make use of) most of the pixels on the screen. People just haven't gotten used to it yet. They're not slow either, and for some workloads apparently very fast: I recently also noticed my phone is faster at certain ffmpeg codecs than my laptop!
I find PentiKeyboard to strike a nice balance. You get six circles sized depending on where you put your fingers, and they contain most of what you expect from a regular keyboard, plus convenience chord for Ctrl+b to hasten tmux actions, in-keyboard cheat sheet and a character lookup and picker.
Ergonomically it's quite good, your fingers end up in a convenient place and when you want to reallocate your body you remove and reset the circles to new positions. The drawback is that on a phone you need to use both hands to type, but if you're doing something like programming or text editing you'll likely be rather involved anyway.
It's also nice that the keyboard doesn't hide half the screen, instead you can look through the circles or touch outside of them to temporarily hide the keyboard entirely.
Edit: Right, forgot to mention perhaps the best functionality, the sixth circle repeats the last bytes it sent, so if you do some action you have a button to just do it again and again. Comes in handy all the time.
Wow that’s interesting but I don’t think I would ever use that. I can actually type really quickly with the touch keyboard but the problem is going back to correct things. On iOS getting the cursor to move back to a previous part of the text to fix an error is and adventure in frustration. Even holding down the space button and draggging the text cursor around is awful. A lot of the times it’s just faster and easier to erase large chunks of text and rewrite it.
I didn't understand what is the point of the first challenge? anyone care to explain me what is the objective/task because there are just two circles and basically no instructions, kinda feels like a real job (lol)
> The mechanics of the puzzles are simple: for each peg, there is a hole, and each peg must overlap with its corresponding hole. To accomplish this, you will add CSS properties to certain divs.
I'm very, very good at CSS and this is absolutely maddening. I grudgingly respect it a lot more because it's really fuckin tough LOL. No overwrites, no transforms, locked elements you can't manipulate, limited amount of CSS property "slots" you're allowed per puzzle. In the age of AI where answers are immediate, hats off to something this absolutely infuriating hahaha
at the second puzzle I went all cocky with a transform and the pop up message telling me I couldn't use it really got me hooked - now, this is a challenge
By the way: the website restricts use of properties like transform() and animation, but the same restriction doesn’t apply to the transition property. Might be worth noting.
It would be fun to use this as a motivational punishment lol. Something like "team member who does the least amount of code review has to go through CSS hell" :).
“Your viewport concerns me.
Hey! You're seeing this message because of your screen- specifically, the width of it. I'm hyped you're here, but this game wasn't designed for small screens, and you will not enjoy attempting it. I mean, would you write code on your phone? Actually, don't answer, because I don't want to know. Anyway, hope to see you soon on a desktop.
-Marcos”
Hopefully “Marcos” doesn’t need a job any time soon! :D
Unsure if the site is supposed to be satire or something because that is the message I received, however, CSS, including responsive design, is actually simple to pick up.
Note that I’m not a designer at all (because THAT requires actual skill), just a dev.
Like many things, CSS is easy to pick up and hard to master.
There's any number of reasons the author might not support mobile for this personal, free project. "I don't feel like it" would be a perfectly valid one.
Also, based on their GitHub profile, they already have a job (at Google).
I spent waaay too long trying to figure out why my CSS rule didn't work. It doesn't accept me to overwrite an already existing one. The rules did not specify this at all. It is not clear that the game wants me to find another rule that fixes the problem instead of adding a single perfectly valid line of CSS that does it. There is a huge difference between those two. CSS being cascading meaning that any CSS property coming after an initial rule will overwrite the previous one (in part or fully). It would be really nice if the game would tell me if the rule I added wasn't allowed instead of just silently failing to do anything with no feedback.
Same, because of the lack of feedback I genuinely thought it didn't work. Especially considering the fact many editing things don't work (double click doesn't select, cmd+(shift+)arrows doesn't work, etc.)
You can still play that way if you want. Just open your browser's dev tools and edit the CSS rules inside the dev tools. Once you have them overlapping, you just need to do something to trigger the victory check which can be accomplished by doing basically anything (resize the window, click on a circle, type something, I haven't found any action that doesn't trigger the victory check yet).
I ran into the same thing and just quit. I would have greatly appreciated this little piece of feedback in the UI.
I thought the site was broken for the exact same reason. Instead of being a troubleshooting / practice type test it's more of a puzzle that I do not care to solve.
Yea I found that stupid as well. I opened the inspector and did it there and it accepted my answer. I decided not to continue afterwards.
It's a perfect representation of CSS: it looks and feels like it should do what you need, but it doesn't _technically_ do what it's supposed to do, so you spend a few hours _trying_ to make sense of it, falling back to just random fuzzing and trial and error, before concluding it's all broken and finally accepting it in its current wonky form, trusting that in some browser, somewhere, it works.
I'm pretty good at handling the cascade and knowing how things work, so this experience you are describing is not mine where CSS is concerned, I doubt I've had to do several hours of trying to make sense of any CSS for probably 5-6 years.
As such that the game does not actually allow you to use the cascade as it should be used is a downside.
C++ I can do.
CSS I leave to masochists.
HTML -> JSX
CSS -> Tailwind
JS -> Typescript
It must be maddening working as a browser dev knowing that the very first thing most devs worth their corn do is immediately go to abstracts so they are able ignore your work as much as they can.
I feel however that trendy tech is moving closer to the browser.
Previously we had things like CoffeeScript, HAML, Pug, SASS/SCSS.
Tailwind is just plain CSS classes and the code generation step is just an optimisation.
For TS there is a proposal for adding type annotations to Javascript. Dunno how far it is, though.
JSX is the odd one out but still closer to HTML than things like HAML, which also had embedded logic but looked nothing like HTML.
It doesn't allow margin-right, you have to use margin to set the right margin. This may be someone's personal hell, not mine.
I got this message on my phone:
"I mean, would you write code on your phone? Actually, don't answer, because I don't want to know."
Yes I would - I do that pretty often these days (partly because LLMs called from my phone do the frustrating typing part for me.)
I can't stand when websites block me off like that. At least let me freaking see what it is about...
In Firefox Android I can request the desktop page explicitly.
Doesn't work on my phone on this site—it's detecting the viewport size, and even in landscape with desktop page mode turned on the site refuses to show anything.
Desktop mode using Firefox v137.0.2 as well as Chrome v135.0.7049.100 on a Pixel 7a worked for me, in both portrait and landscape.
Tried that on some service promoted here yesterday, they still figured out I was on Android and kept blocking me. Happens rather often, actually.
I find it convenient to do both some programming and exploring documentation and new technologies on a tablet, and just discard those that don't allow me to. If you're selling to computer professionals you shouldn't try to preempt the expected problem of customers complaining that your services don't render right on a small iPhone.
Vivaldi also lets you do this
iOS safari requesting desktop site no luck. But Orion from Kagi shows the desktop version.
I started the SolidJS tutorial on my iPhone this morning. Was impressed that it worked at all, but I couldn’t find a way to copy & paste, and switched to my MacBook. Better than giving up I guess…
I think I'm going to be sick
Mostly in ChatGPT Canvas/Claude Artifacts or the like?
Yes exactly - usually in Artifacts, which I then copy and paste into the GitHub web editor in order to ship them via GitHub Pages to https://tools.simonwillison.net/
From your phone?! With that tiny screen?
Depends what you call tiny. I've only found one "tiny" phone (that is, a normal smartphone size ten years ago) with a modern chipset (so I don't need to replace it in <=3 years) and that's the Jelly Max... but it's only purchasable directly from China and their warranty page is broken so I don't want to throw my coins into a slot machine. Can't find even a single other model, no matter the price. Xperia 5 V comes close but is only available second hand; Xperia 10 VI has a pretty slow SoC. Everything else is a size that people amusedly called "phablet", or was literally a tablet
Phones are definitely usable as desktops nowadays, especially if you stick it in a cardboard and can actually see (make use of) most of the pixels on the screen. People just haven't gotten used to it yet. They're not slow either, and for some workloads apparently very fast: I recently also noticed my phone is faster at certain ffmpeg codecs than my laptop!
I feel like the touch inputs are a bigger hinderance than the screen. Manipulating text with a touch screen keyboard is torture.
I find PentiKeyboard to strike a nice balance. You get six circles sized depending on where you put your fingers, and they contain most of what you expect from a regular keyboard, plus convenience chord for Ctrl+b to hasten tmux actions, in-keyboard cheat sheet and a character lookup and picker.
Ergonomically it's quite good, your fingers end up in a convenient place and when you want to reallocate your body you remove and reset the circles to new positions. The drawback is that on a phone you need to use both hands to type, but if you're doing something like programming or text editing you'll likely be rather involved anyway.
It's also nice that the keyboard doesn't hide half the screen, instead you can look through the circles or touch outside of them to temporarily hide the keyboard entirely.
Edit: Right, forgot to mention perhaps the best functionality, the sixth circle repeats the last bytes it sent, so if you do some action you have a button to just do it again and again. Comes in handy all the time.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.software_la...
Wow that’s interesting but I don’t think I would ever use that. I can actually type really quickly with the touch keyboard but the problem is going back to correct things. On iOS getting the cursor to move back to a previous part of the text to fix an error is and adventure in frustration. Even holding down the space button and draggging the text cursor around is awful. A lot of the times it’s just faster and easier to erase large chunks of text and rewrite it.
I always buy the iPhone with the largest screen, but yeah.
[dead]
I didn't understand what is the point of the first challenge? anyone care to explain me what is the objective/task because there are just two circles and basically no instructions, kinda feels like a real job (lol)
1. Peg A and Hole A to see the CSS on both elements 2. Peg A can have one more rule added to it (that you can specify)
Your objective is to get Peg A over Hole A.
Spoiler free hint (reverse text to read):
)tnetsisnoc yats ot tsuj stinu wv esu ot tnaw yam uoy dna( nigram gnisu sevlovni noitulos ehT
From the opening page of the site:
> The mechanics of the puzzles are simple: for each peg, there is a hole, and each peg must overlap with its corresponding hole. To accomplish this, you will add CSS properties to certain divs.
I'm very, very good at CSS and this is absolutely maddening. I grudgingly respect it a lot more because it's really fuckin tough LOL. No overwrites, no transforms, locked elements you can't manipulate, limited amount of CSS property "slots" you're allowed per puzzle. In the age of AI where answers are immediate, hats off to something this absolutely infuriating hahaha
at the second puzzle I went all cocky with a transform and the pop up message telling me I couldn't use it really got me hooked - now, this is a challenge
transform is forbidden but -webkit-transform seems to work :^)
I did exactly this too haha
cool stuff :)
I got some warnings like "this is not a best practice and I don't like bad practices". Like hey, who are you to judge me like that? I'm offended.
By the way: the website restricts use of properties like transform() and animation, but the same restriction doesn’t apply to the transition property. Might be worth noting.
Guess I'll go back to coding on my phone :'(
It would be fun to use this as a motivational punishment lol. Something like "team member who does the least amount of code review has to go through CSS hell" :).
"team member quits on the spot .003s later"
First puzzle was hard, margin-right was not working. But you can't double click or use ctrl-arrow or ctrl-backspace which is infuriating.
Also typo in "Unfortuantely" message when you use the forbidden transform
an extension to run with my phone would be nice
I got stuck on #2 and had to look up the solution, which still doesn't seem to make sense?
apparently the pegs only have to touch the holes, they don't have to line up perfectly
ahhhhhhh thanks
how do you look up the solutions?
The intro instructions link to https://github.com/marcos-acosta/css-hell/blob/main/solution...
https://github.com/marcos-acosta/css-hell/blob/main/solution...
Just an FYI... Your screen size plays into the solutions. Make your browser width 1350px.
Does it? Aren't units viewport relative?
I like how I can click-drag one of the CSS text fields and still move the box.
/s ?
#9 really got me.
I'm confused. I completed the first two puzzles just applying a simple
I thought I wasn't allowed to?It seems like I can trivially complete the third puzzle with the same approach.
did you do it with your browser's developer tools?
> Web site created using create-react-app bro...
“Your viewport concerns me. Hey! You're seeing this message because of your screen- specifically, the width of it. I'm hyped you're here, but this game wasn't designed for small screens, and you will not enjoy attempting it. I mean, would you write code on your phone? Actually, don't answer, because I don't want to know. Anyway, hope to see you soon on a desktop. -Marcos”
Hopefully “Marcos” doesn’t need a job any time soon! :D
Unsure if the site is supposed to be satire or something because that is the message I received, however, CSS, including responsive design, is actually simple to pick up.
Note that I’m not a designer at all (because THAT requires actual skill), just a dev.
Like many things, CSS is easy to pick up and hard to master.
There's any number of reasons the author might not support mobile for this personal, free project. "I don't feel like it" would be a perfectly valid one.
Also, based on their GitHub profile, they already have a job (at Google).
Oh that place with the silly bikes and free Oreos? No wonder.
Silly bikes, free Oreos, and above market salary doesn't seem too bad as far as jobs go.
My mind went something more like this:
You dare to call this game "CSS Hell", and then tell me that it will be TOO hell for me to play on a phone???
I USE CSS EVERY DAY. YOU UNDERESTIMATE MY TOLERANCE FOR SELF-HARM, MORTAL.
*opens site in mobile in desktop mode
Uh uh... I am going to count your response as 'Challange accepted.' What multi pain/pane does your phone run?
ngl running in phone was definitely not ideal