CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) remains the foundation of web styling nearly three decades after its 1996 debut. The basics are straightforward: selectors target HTML elements, properties define what changes, values specify how. A paragraph turns blue with p { color: blue; }. Heading size adjusts with h1 { font-size: 32px; }. Spacing uses margin (outside elements) and padding (inside).
What the tutorials won't tell you: these fundamentals scale poorly.
Enterprise teams building multi-product design systems face specificity wars—competing CSS rules that cascade unpredictably across hundreds of components. The box model's nuances (margin collapse, padding inheritance) that seem academic in tutorials become debugging nightmares when your checkout flow breaks in production.
The numbers explain the shift: while CSS powers roughly 98% of websites according to W3Techs data, 70%+ of enterprises now standardize on utility frameworks like Tailwind or Bootstrap rather than writing vanilla CSS. The $40B+ global frontend development market has largely decided that CSS basics are table stakes, not solutions.
Two camps have emerged. Utility framework advocates argue predefined classes eliminate specificity conflicts and speed development. Critics counter that CSS-in-JS approaches (styled-components, emotion) bloat bundle sizes and overcomplicate simple styling needs.
The practical takeaway for technical leaders: CSS fundamentals remain non-negotiable knowledge for any web team. But the decision that actually impacts velocity isn't whether developers understand selectors—it's whether your organization invests in a consistent styling architecture from day one or pays the refactoring cost later.
External stylesheets beat inline styles for maintainability. Semantic class names beat presentational ones. Modern CSS features like Grid and Flexbox beat float-based layouts. These aren't trends—they're the basics, properly applied.
The core language hasn't changed much since 1996. What's changed is the scale of problems teams need to solve with it.