> "none of these things can be learned quickly, and they seem to require many months of experience to actually get right consistently in practice."
That's the same for any language. Especially those that don't just clone the language you already know.
CSS just happens to be the one that takes a structured document and styles it for presentation. Like Latex, like XSL-FO, troff, PostScript. Relatively, CSS is easier to pick up and run with.
> That's the same for any language. Especially those that don't just clone the language you already know.
I don't think that's true. Sure, it takes a bit of time to learn a new syntax, a bit more time to learn language-specific concepts. And every language has it's gotchas and quirks. But most languages I've worked with, even javascript ('the good parts'), are ultimately quite consistent and allow you to focus on solving actual problems pretty quickly.
CSS, on the other hand, has tons of quirks that lead to issues that require either annoying trial-and-error to fix, after-the-fact bugfixing for particular devices or browsers, or a deep knowledge of the logic involved.
Back in high school, I loved mathematics and physics, because difficult things felt 'fair'. And figuring them out felt satisfying. On the other hand, I disliked biology and to a lesser degree chemistry, because it seemed like there were gotchas and quirks everywhere that required rote memorization, not understanding. Or at least not at a high school level.
I've only met a handful of people who seemed to really know the fundamentals of css. These people read the specs, but also played a role in the development of new css features. I think there's still a market for 'true' css/html experts. Knowing the exact ins and outs of html and css across browsers and platforms is arcane knowledge, and if you know this you might get away with not being much of a programmer.
That's the same for any language. Especially those that don't just clone the language you already know.
CSS just happens to be the one that takes a structured document and styles it for presentation. Like Latex, like XSL-FO, troff, PostScript. Relatively, CSS is easier to pick up and run with.