browsers support old HTML + CSS forever

Illustration of a smiling stick figure with long hair, talking to a browser from 2020, represented by a box with a smiley face.

person: I wrote this CSS in 1998
2020 browser: still works great!

this makes CSS hard to write…

Illustration of two stick figures talking

person 1: why are CSS units so weird?
person 2, with grey hair: let me tell you a story from 20 years ago…

but it means it’s worth the investment

Illustration of a smiling stick figure with long hair, talking to a browser, represented by a box with a smiley face.

person: I spent DAYS getting this CSS to work
browser: I’ll make sure it keeps working forever!

if you don’t follow the

standards, you’re not guaranteed backwards compatibility my site broke! (oh yeah, Firefox dropped support for that experiment

your CSS doesn’t have to support browsers from 1998

Illustration of a smiling stick figure with short curly hair.

person: just test that your CSS works on the browsers that your users are using!

newer features are often easier to use

what people expect from a website has changed a LOT since 1998. Newer CSS features make responsive design easy