I thought "!important" was always about appealing to the emotions of overwhelmed and confused CSS authors as it seems to make the computer "listen to you" when it doesn't seem to be.
about techniques used to get pixel perfect results with HTML back in the 1990s. The author of that book was quite impressed with CSS as it really does give designers great tools to work with, but it's still got the problem that designers find it hard to be disciplined with. That is, a lot of designers are stuck in a "let's draw a pretty picture" mindset but find it hard to think like "let's develop a system that makes it easy to draw lots of pretty pictures". Thus we get a lot of things like bootstrap and tailwind that erode the idea of CSS classes being somewhat semantic and being related to the structure of the system (e.g. this particular toolbar as it manifests in this application) as opposed to "a generic toolbar that comes out of a framework" or "something that has 15px of margin".)
I remember this notorious book
https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Killer-Sites-David-Siegel/dp...
about techniques used to get pixel perfect results with HTML back in the 1990s. The author of that book was quite impressed with CSS as it really does give designers great tools to work with, but it's still got the problem that designers find it hard to be disciplined with. That is, a lot of designers are stuck in a "let's draw a pretty picture" mindset but find it hard to think like "let's develop a system that makes it easy to draw lots of pretty pictures". Thus we get a lot of things like bootstrap and tailwind that erode the idea of CSS classes being somewhat semantic and being related to the structure of the system (e.g. this particular toolbar as it manifests in this application) as opposed to "a generic toolbar that comes out of a framework" or "something that has 15px of margin".)