When was the last time you bought any large item from a physical store that didn't come with advertisements in the packaging for direct services?

If you buy a Disney DVD from Walmart, there will be advertisements inside the DVD case for direct services (heck, last time I checked there were ads on the outside of the case). If you buy a Roomba from Walmart, there will be advertisements for direct parts and addons from the manufacturer. If you buy a hecking Apple Ipad from Walmart, Apple will include advertisements for its direct services once you start using the product.

People bring up this comparison all the time and it's very simply not true. You can advertise direct services inside physical products you sell at stores. What Apple is saying is not that you can't advertise prices in the store page, Apple is saying that you can't advertise alternative platforms in the app itself.

There is no physical equivalent to this for storefronts like Walmart. Home Depot does not have a restriction on whether a physical product you buy from them can have an advertisement for direct manufacturer services inside the box or software that comes with it.

If we want to be consistent about this, Apple really should be paying Walmart a fee for any app-store purchases made on devices that were bought from Walmart. After all, the user got the device from Walmart, right? Shouldn't they get their cut of app store purchases? That's how Apple sees the world.

Looks close - those services are typically not the same as what you can get at Walmart. You can get parts, but often the device itself isn't sold (instead they list places you can buy). Or if you can buy direct it is cheaper from Walmart. Walmart is a large enough customer that they won't let you sell it for less (either you don't undercut Walmart, or you will sell zero at Walmart).

> those services are typically not the same as what you can get at Walmart.

Several things:

A) Apple doesn't sell a creator subscription service that's the same as what you can get from Patreon.

B) You can advertise inside of a box for services that Walmart does provide (yes, that includes devices).

C) Is your implication that if Walmart did open up a music streaming service that suddenly it would be improper for iOS to advertise Apple Music on devices purchased from Walmart? Because that's a wild thing to suggest.

D) Just re-stating B more directly: Apple advertises direct hardware purchases from the physical Apple store - a direct competitor to Walmart's tech hardware sales - for hardware that Walmart actively sells. And Apple advertises that hardware on devices and within packaging for devices that are bought from Walmart.

Apple's website homepage for the iPad has in big block letters halfway down the page: "Why Apple is the best place to buy iPad." Under Apple's rules, they would not be able to link to this page within an iOS app.

There is no equivalent to this in hardware land.

> Or if you can buy direct it is cheaper from Walmart.

I'm not going to drive over to Walmart to check this, but I severely doubt that Walmart is consistently offering all of its Apple hardware at a cheaper price than an Apple store.

> Walmart is a large enough customer that they won't let you sell it for less (either you don't undercut Walmart, or you will sell zero at Walmart).

Which is still egregious and anti-competitive! But amazingly, somehow less egregious than what Apple is doing. Ask yourself, how anti-competitive and abusive does a company have to be in order to be worse than Walmart? That's almost an accomplishment.

Walmart carefully avoids anti-competitiveness in these deals. The OEM cannot sell for less than Walmart, but the target down the street might.

Walmart does, in fact, sell devices, and Apple uses their devices to advertise third party services to Walmart customers which compete (e.g. Amazon app)

> as this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men.

This gets brought up sometimes in terf talking points, but as a practical reality, it's nonsense. Every queer community I've interacted with has always been great about accepting gender non-conformity. The separation of "passing" from gender identity is an important part of recognizing that gender expression within a society is a social construct for good and for ill, and that a large part of gender presentation is play-acting in the way that society expects a man/woman to act.

"My gender is not how I act/present, it's what I am" is a common refrain in queer communities, as is the idea that you don't have to pass to be a gender, as is the idea that gender identity persists even when someone is in the closet.

In contrast, "we can always tell" is the 'gender-critical' talking point. To be very clear: it is not transgender people harassing butch lesbians for using women's bathrooms. It is the terfs doing that crap.

They phrase it as "my gender isn't whether or not I like pink" but in practice terf ideology usually ends up descending into biological essentialism and an omnipresent suspicion over whether or not women are "feminine" enough. In this very comment section, take a look at who is arguing that biological differences are sufficient to explain demographic differences and gender biases within LLMs. Hint: it's not the trans community :)

> > as this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men.

> This gets brought up sometimes in terf talking points, but as a practical reality, it's nonsense.

Okay so if not that, why are these women calling themselves men?

These men's internal gender identity is masculine. That's why they are calling themselves men.

This comment is actually kind of a really good example of what I was explaining up above. It's a very terf kind of thing to look at a comment saying "gender is complicated and individual and doesn't fit into a box and transgender communities understand that" and to immediately say, "gender does fit into a box, it's whether or not you have a penis, and if you don't have one then you're just 'pretending' to be a man."

And then to somehow claim that reducing and denigrating the experience of both manhood and womenhood to pure biology in this way is somehow "feminist."

The entire terf experience is looking at transgender people who are engaging with gender identity and gender expression in thoughtful, sophisticated, multi-faceted ways and saying, "haha, they're men, look they have an adams apple." Because there's nothing more feminist than critiquing people's bodies, apparently. /s

And it really just gets across why the "transgender people are the real sexists" argument is so ridiculous in the context of how these interactions play out in the real world. One group (the trans community) affirms your gender no matter how you express it, and the other group (the terf community) constantly demands to see what's in your pants and yells at anyone who looks masculine while wearing a dress. It's kind of obvious which group is reinforcing toxic gender norms.

> These men's internal gender identity is masculine. That's why they are calling themselves men.

Well then, that goes straight to the heart of my point. Men don't have to be masculine. And women don't have to be feminine. All you've done is swap "men must be masculine" for "anyone masculine is a man".

A woman calling herself a man because she feels she has masculine qualities is exactly the sort of sexist rubbish we should be challenging and rejecting. Just like men feeling that they're not "real men" because they don't conform to cultural stereotypes of masculinity. It's regressive, restrictive and ridiculous.

> constantly demands to see what's in your pants

What? This has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. Have I demanded anyone open their underwear for inspection? No, of course not. Sorry but your prepackaged rants about "terfs" are irrelevant.

> All you've done is swap "men must be masculine" for "anyone masculine is a man".

No, very literally the opposite of that. I'm saying if someone calls themselves a man, I believe them. I don't care if they wear dresses or slacks, I don't care if they're muscular, I care what they tell me their identity is, because it's not my job to decide other people's gender. I'm not the gender police.

This is what's great about queer communities and why they tend to be so accepting of non-gender-conforming expressions. Because their criteria for gender isn't what your chromosomes are, or how you dress, or how you act, or what your presentation is, or what stereotypes you fit into -- their criteria is asking you your gender.

And it turns out that's a really supportive environment to be in if you're a man or a woman or any other gender identity and you aren't in total alignment with social expectations of that gender. It turns out that having people ask what your gender is and just saying "okay" regardless of how you present - is pretty great and goes a long way towards removing the pressure to present in a specific way or live up to social expectations for that gender.

----

> A woman calling herself a man because she feels she has masculine qualities is exactly the sort of sexist rubbish we should be challenging and rejecting.

I love the gall of repeatedly misgendering trans people against their wishes, and then acting like you're defending their gender expression by doing that. If a man calls himself a man, just hecking believe them. You deciding for someone else what their gender is is not feminism, it's sexist prescriptivism. You looking at someone who tells you they're a man and saying, "well, you just feel that way because etc etc..." is not you breaking out of gender norms, it is you putting people into a box based on your personal criteria for what makes a man or a woman. It is you denying them agency to identify outside of that box.

That's not progressive, you're not helping them. You're imposing your social criteria for gender onto them, very openly against their wishes -- it is a denial of their agency. But oh of course, they don't know what they want, right? They're just confused, right? You can't trust them to know what their gender identity is, you have to treat them like children and talk about how they're being pressured into whatever decisions they're making. /s

----

> What? This has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. Have I demanded anyone open their underwear for inspection?

I'm curious, when you say that a "woman" calls themselves a "man" -- what criteria are you using to decide for them what their gender is? I mean, you're saying they're wrong. You're saying they're not men, so you must have some kind of test or standard that you're using to determine for them what their gender is, since you're so confident that they're wrong about themselves.

Is that test perhaps... what their chromosomes are? What genitalia they were born with? What's in their pants?

You can say you don't care what's in their pants, but you obviously do or else you wouldn't be misgendering them. You have a test you're using for whether they're a man or a woman, a test that they're not measuring up to, and I can pretty confidently guess that test is biological.

----

Look, in the interest of being charitable here and trying to build bridges, I want to at least take the chance that you're saying all of this because you genuinely just don't understand how transgender identity works. Earlier, you said:

> this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men. And that if a woman does that too, then she's a man.

If transgender identities worked that way, it would be toxic and sexist. Calling someone a woman because they act in a certain way or wear dresses, or calling someone a man because they like football -- all of that would be extremely sexist.

To be very, very clear, transgender communities don't do that.

Transgender communities do not impose gender on anyone, your gender expression and presentation are not your gender identity. If you are a transgender man and you are still in the closet, and you act in a traditionally feminine way to everyone around you, transgender communities will... ask you what you want them to refer to you as.

There is no imposition here or expectation that you act in a stereotypical way. Trans theory rejects the notion that other people get to decide for you what your gender is -- regardless of what you wear, how you act, or how you think. If you're saying all of this because you legitimately believed that transgender people were going around saying, "sorry, but you wear a dress, that makes you a woman", the really good news is that nobody does that. You can be a man and wear a dress and act "feminine" however society defines "feminine", and you can still use he/him pronouns and you will be welcome in trans communities as a man. Trans communities are extremely supportive of this, this is not a group of people running around saying "if you act too feminine then you're a girl now, sorry we're just deciding that for you."

The only people who are deciding for you whether you're a man or a woman based on their own criteria -- are terfs and gender-critical movements.

How can you consolidate the facts that "man" and "woman" mean absolutely nothing, they don't describe how you act, express or present, but at the same time you can feel like a "man"(which doesn't feel any certain way) and demand to be called a "man" fully knowing that this does not mean anything? What is anyone going to do with that knowledge? Where does the need to be a certain gender arise when there's no meaning to it? Why not remove gender?

As a biological "man" i don't feel like a "man" or "woman". I simply am what i am. My language has no word for "gender" even. I don't understand what it means to feel a certain gender.

Doesn't the need to feel like a "man" imply that the person has an internal image of what a proper "man" is? Isn't that image based on the stereotypical presentation of a biological "man"?

You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you. So gender is literally just a word, a combination of letters, nothing else. Why use the terms "man" and "woman"? Why not "sdia" and "sdp[asd", seeing as all these terms are the same? There's no qualities or requirements attached to them.

> You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you.

It's not the entire purpose. That's part of it, the rest is about enabling abusive men to insert themselves into any place that women and girls have separate from men and boys. They won't accept that women have the right to say no. These men have a rapist mindset and the trans movement is their shield and sword.

Case in point of what I was talking about above, femoid's comment is what you're going to run into if you interact with terf spaces, and it regularly spills out to attacks on cisgender people as well. It's not uncommon for terfs to harass and attack cisgender women under the assumption that they think they might be trans (I am not joking with that, do some research into how bathroom bills have affected the harassment of butch women).

And so whenever anyone says that transgender groups are reinforcing gender norms I kind of have to shake my head, because it's difficult to find a group more obsessed with the idea of stereotypical gender norms than the supposedly "gender critical" crowd. And unsurprisingly, that leads to a lot of reinforcement of toxic gender stereotypes; both in the idea of men as an intrinsically, biologically distrustworthy group, and in the practical reality that they are constantly looking at other women and thinking, "is this person a spy, is this person a man in disguise, is this person feminine enough that I can trust them."

And it's just so omnipresent. The above is a comment by someone who looked at a thread about whether or not transgender communities reinforce gender norms, where both sides are reasonably trying to be compassionate, and they could have tried to present a picture of terfs as anything other than what I described them as above, they could have tried to dispute my characterization of gender critical communities -- but they just couldn't help themselves, they couldn't stop themselves from jumping into the conversation and claiming out of nowhere that transgender people all have "a rapist mindset."

So yeah, if you're gender non-conforming, or you don't like gender stereotypes, or you're pushing away from a socially defined set of rules for gender, unsurprisingly, the communities that accept you as you are are all going to be healthier for your development than the communities that are constantly one "she looks too muscular" take away from calling you a rapist.

And it's helpful that whenever I try to explain this to people and they seem doubtful, a terf will literally register a new account just to jump in and prove my point for me <3

> How can you consolidate the facts that "man" and "woman" mean absolutely nothing, they don't describe how you act, express or present, but at the same time you can feel like a "man"

We could have a long conversation about this, but the actual useful short answer here is, I don't. I don't call it. Anything.

Because it's not my job to decide for you your gender.

I want to keep on circling back to this point. You are still trying to come up with the rules about who is and isn't a man; what the criteria is that they have to meet. I reject those rules. If, as you are saying, gender impacts nothing and you have no concept of it, then there is no reason not to treat transgender people with respect, to gender them correctly.

If you're arguing that the word "man" and "woman" means nothing, then why are you out here saying that someone is mistakenly calling themselves a man or a woman? (note that if you are arguing that the words man and woman mean genitals or chromosomes and everything else must extend from there, I am going to call that out as biological essentialism, literally hundreds if not thousands of years of feminism exist that talk about the problems with that kind of reduction of male and female experience).

I do have theories about what gender is and how it works and what its limitations as a concept are. They might be right, they might be wrong. But what I really reject is the sexist notion that it is my job to determine for everyone else the limitations and rules of gender, pronouns, presentation, and especially identity.

----

> My language has no word for "gender" even. I don't understand what it means to feel a certain gender.

And I want to keep hammering this point -- then why are you misgendering people? You have no concept of gender... but you're calling men women against their wishes.

I reject the notion that gender needs to be a prescriptive, socially-assigned identity. Not because I don't have my own opinions, but because I reject the sexist notion that this is my decision to make for other people.

I think that wrapped up in the need to understand why a transgender man or a transgender woman knows they are a man or a woman, is this instinct that has been hammered into all of us by society that people have to prove their gender to you. But they don't. It can be really interesting to talk about the why, and if you go into trans spaces where people feel really safe, they do talk about the why.

But the "why" is academic. The practical side is, "I don't have to prove to you that I am who I am. You are not in charge of my identity."

----

> You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you

To expand on the above, the entire point of the trans movement is social and legal rights. The point of the trans movement is equality for trans people.

Trans people themselves are not a movement, they're simply people who exist who have a gender identity (like many cis people who also have a gender identity and will also be very offended if you misgender them). The transgender movement is a response to oppression of transgender people, that's all that it is. It is not a demand that you think about gender in a certain way, it is a demand that groups like the GOP stop trying to oppress transgender people, drive them out of public society, and remove their bodily and social autonomy.

It is a small thing, but people respecting you enough to use the gender that you identify as when they refer to you is, I think, a pretty straightforward ask. People act like this is really weird, but try misgendering cisgender people for a day and see how mad they get. In this comment section you're seeing people get mad about the term cisgender. So let's not act like the transgender community has all of the fragile people here.

Again, this respect boils down to: do you feel like you're in charge of everyone's gender? Do you feel like their identity is your decision to make? Do you feel like their pronouns, their appearance, how they go through social spaces is your decision based on your criteria, or do you respect their understanding of their own identity?

----

> So gender is literally just a word, a combination of letters, nothing else. Why use the terms "man" and "woman"? Why not "sdia" and "sdp[asd", seeing as all these terms are the same? There's no qualities or requirements attached to them.

Right here you're kind of close to vocalizing something very important. I would not say that gender means nothing, but I would say that (I personally believe) it is a social construct. And the question I ask is: if gender doesn't ultimately physically mean anything, if it is a set of categories that are socially defined, then why not play with it? What natural law or moral code is being violated by playing in that space, changing it up, exploring it, bending it, even rejecting it? The space is a social construct, we can do with it what we want.

And so there are transgender people who identify as agender and who are totally neutral on the concept. Some who are nonbinary. We have transgender people who are nongender who reject the notion of gender entirely (and not in the weak 'gender-critical' way where terfs are still very much embracing gender, just tying it harder to biology).

There are transgender people who go by "it". There are transgender people who use meta-pronouns. There are gender-fluid people.

And you might think that's silly, but it does have a really cool effect: if you're a self-conscious girl or boy who feels weird about gender norms and feels like society is constantly telling you that you need to act a certain way because you do or don't have a penis -- suddenly there's this community that could not give a darn about that. They aren't going to tell you that you have to act a certain way to be a man, they aren't going to tell you that you can't wear a dress, they aren't even going to tell you that you have to call yourself a man or a woman.

The cool thing about stripping away both the social rules and all of the "no, you don't understand yourself, you're just confused, let us tell you what you are" talk -- the cool thing is that when you strip that away, what you're left with is authentic, unburdened, honest expression. The kind of authenticity that doesn't require you to constantly prove your identity or perform for other people. You end up with a community that just... accepts you.

And I think that's a wildly positive thing if we're actually trying to push past gender stereotypes and to question the toxic patriarchal norms that society drills into our heads day after day about what manhood and womanhood mean. Maybe you think that agender people are silly. Or if you don't have an internal concept of gender, maybe it's the opposite and you think that agender or nongender people are the only non-silly ones! But it doesn't matter where you fall on that, these spaces are really positive grounds for people to question gender and to question their relationship with gender. Not only do I not see the harm, I see the benefits.

And then I look over at the gender-critical and the terf side and I see... bathroom bills, and people snorting about how they can "always tell", and book bannings, and denial of bodily agency even for transgender adults, and concern-trolling about fertility, and all of this toxic stuff that is so weirdly common in terf circles -- all bundled up into this general prescriptivism around manhood and womanhood that is so clearly not helping people or moving forward any kind of serious conversation about how a social construct impacts our lives and how we should react to it.

It doesn't mean anything to say that you're rejecting gender if you don't have the actions to back it up -- but the transgender community actually has the actions to back it up.

This is somewhat begging the question. It assumes that:

A) this is a unified model for how queer people talk about gender.

B) the term "cisgender" does anything at all to advance it. And

C) that it causes harm.

without providing any evidence for any of those claims.

----

It also assumes:

D) that the multiple ideas being bundled up here are entirely incorrect, or that they are some kind of new idea.

Male and female genders are socially constructed, at the very least in presentation -- and that's not a new idea, it's an entirely uncontroversial understanding of gender that's been around for ages. Just as one example, pink used to be a manly color. Social stereotypes of women as innocent or highly sexual and wild also vary between cultures and time periods.

This has been a theory of gender for a long time, it's not a new idea. And it has nothing to do with sexual biological differences beyond expressing the (again, entirely uncontroversial and generally accepted) idea that not all social customs and attitudes are 100% biologically based.

----

And you might have criticism of that model, just like you might have criticisms of gender essentialism. There is not uniformity on how to view gender even within queer communities. There is no singular model to debunk. Everyone (queer or not) has their own model of gender.

And that's the final problem to bring up, that you're also assuming:

E) that the statement "I'm not cisgender, I'm normal" doesn't have harmful effects, or that it doesn't push people towards a competing model of gender with its own flaws and inaccuracies that could be interrogated in the exact same way as other gender/sex models.

Think even bigger, why not reinvent the wheel every time every product is developed? Why have a common platform for anything?

If you think about it, what value is there in all these companies using the same roads to ship products? Can't they build their own? And is it really important that every business accept the same currency?

Yes, platform independence and shared universal access to common standards that consumers can consistently trust to provide similar experiences across products and ecosystems does admittedly reduce wasted development resources, increase competition, and makes the market more accessible to new businesses. And sure, I guess technically it reduces consumer confusion, and sure it benefits consumers by making products and services more interoperable. But who are we to say that any of that is good? /s

Is there a reason why Google can't get its users to install the extension and approve the permission for that API?

I would theorize the reason Google doesn't go through that process is that it's unrealistic to expect users en mass to do that, and the only way to get wide rollout would be to build it into a browser by default and then for good measure to hide the fact that it's installed -- something which, notably, Zoom can't do.

But I mean, if it's no big deal to get users to install an extension, then Google can stop bundling it by default and instead ask users to install it, right?

"All they're doing is making their product better."

"Making your product better by privileging your own domains in the browser is the anti-competitive part."

"Come on, it's not like it's making their product better."

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This really isn't complicated. Is this making Google Meet better? I would quote:

> danielmarkbruce: "They are just trying to make their products better."

Okay. So then Google Meet would be a worse product if they didn't have privileged API access over other apps. So... this does make it harder for those other apps to compete, unless you think that the quality of a product is somehow irrelevant for competition.

Sure, Google Meet still isn't winning, but who knows where they'd be in the market if they didn't privilege themselves.

You're saying that their product would be worse if they didn't do this, but also that it somehow doesn't matter because they're not the best product. Which has a similar energy to me cutting a loop out of a marathon and saying, "Come on guys, I only came in third. It's not cheating unless I come in first, everybody knows that. As long as I don't come in first I'm allowed to take shortcuts. Give me my third place medal that I definitely earned fairly, why is everybody mad about this?"

The implications of this in the article are mainly focused on the ethics, but at least where the copyright is concerned there is no problem with this -- Midjourney Images are not copyrightable, and it doesn't seem like there's any grounds for Midjourney to complain; especially if the images were uploaded by 3rd-party users and not sourced directly by Adobe under a Midjourney license.

From the article:

> Training on AI-generated content probably wouldn’t make Adobe’s Firefly image generator less commercially safe, and the company isn’t required to say what it’s training on as long as it isn’t misleading consumers, said Harvard professor Rebecca Tushnet, who focuses on copyright and advertising law. But training on AI images, such as those created by Midjourney, undermines the idea that Firefly is unique from competing services, she said.

The critique here isn't that Adobe is violating Midjourney's copyright, it's that Firefly's data ultimately is not as ethically sourced as Adobe claims (keeping in mind that different commenters probably have different qualifications of what ethically sourced training data would be).

> I meant the concept that when you e.g. apply the style "color: blue;" to an element, all child elements get the same style unless you override it.

This is the first thing you've said so far that I would push back against. Neither BEM nor Tailwind removes this behavior that I'm aware of. I thought when talking about the cascade you meant generic styles on elements like "p", "ul", etc... getting applied across separate components, or specificity of child selectors, or something similar.

If you really dislike styles being applied to children in the DOM that don't override those styles, I don't think there is a way around that other than web-based components and shadow DOM with isolated styles. Or I guess use a bunch of style resets beforehand I guess? Neither Tailwind nor BEM gets rid of child inheritance of applied styles; you can use @layer I guess, but that doesn't get rid of that behavior either, it just allows you a bit more control over style order.

If you're using Tailwind and you write:

  <div class="text-red-400">
     <p>Some text</p>
  </div>

that text will be red. If you're using BEM and you write:

  <div class="Container">
     <p>Some text</p>
  </div>

  .Container { color: red; }

same deal.

> I thought with inheritance you meant generic styles on elements like "p", "ul", etc... getting applied across separate components

Yes, so I mean if you add "color: blue" to "p", it's now going to start interacting with any element that's a child of "p" (which will probably be on all pages on your website so hard to predict and check what will happen).

BEM and Tailwind don't get rid of the behaviour of the color being applied to child elements, but it at least forces you to isolates these kinds of style changes to the component level (vs sitewide) which is what improves maintainability.

Okay, we are on the same page then -- sorry. Yep, I generally agree with this.

I'm inclined to semi-agree with this, although I'm not sure I'd be quite as adamant about it myself. But I do generally think that CSS is taught in a way that encourages some bad practice around cascade/inheritance. I will point out though that (at least in my experience), BEM solved the majority of these problems for me even without a preprocessor. The language is definitely oriented towards inheritance/cascade, but I think there are ways to avoid it.

There's some movement towards ::part as a proposal to grant some mixin behaviors (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::part) but I've never messed with it, and it's applicable only to shadow DOM. But mixins haven't been a huge issue for me in even enterprise-scale styling that I've done.

Opinion me, everyone has their own opinions on this, use whatever CSS style works for you. This is not me saying that BEM is the best for everyone, just giving a perspective that as someone who tends to stick to vanilla CSS and who generally kind of hates working with technologies like Tailwind or CSS-in-JS, BEM-style vanilla CSS made CSS pretty pleasant for me to work with; I have a lot more appreciation for the language now than I used to.

So if you're annoyed by CSS but also get annoyed by pre-processors or think that Tailwind is just inline CSS under a different name[0], you still don't need to be bound to the cascade -- potentially look into BEM. No technology or compilation or dependencies, it's literally just a naming convention and style guide.

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[0]: yes, I have used it extensively, please don't comment that if I used it more something would magically click, I already understand the points in its favor that you're going to comment and I've already heard the style/framework suggestions you're going to offer. It's fine if you like Tailwind, it's great if it helps you write CSS, you don't need to convince me.

> But I do generally think that CSS is taught in a way that encourages some bad practice around cascade/inheritance. I will point out though that (at least in my experience), BEM solved the majority of these problems for me even without a preprocessor.

I think cascading is just a bad default, and I think methodologies like BEM agrees with this by teaching you ways to write CSS in ways that stops cascading from getting in the way.

Cascading styles are fine for styling how basic document content is shown (e.g. h2, p, a, li etc. tags) but outside of this, you generally don't want the styles of parent elements leaking into the styles of child elements. Cascading/inheritance styles is a useful tool to have, but not as the default.

I'm not saying Tailwind is perfect, but it's closer to "prefer composition over inheritance", where you can sprinkle in some cascading/inheritance where it makes sense.

> I think cascading is just a bad default

I'm again semi-inclined to agree, I just don't think I'd say it as forcefully; more that cascading styles tends to have a lot of downsides that people aren't familiar with and aren't taught.

My point isn't to badmouth Tailwind here; but debates about this sometimes boil down to "CSS purists" vs "Tailwind advocates" and my point is more -- nah, you don't have to like Tailwind to avoid the cascade. You can be a CSS purist and still avoid basic element selectors, your choice does not have to be either "do semantic styling targeting only semantic elements" or "jump on Tailwind and stick a bunch of styles inline."

I'm more sticking up for -- look, if you're someone who uses Tailwind, great, I don't have to tell you anything. You are already using a framework that (regardless of any other flaws it may or may not have) discourages you from using the cascade. But if you're someone who's in the position where you dislike CSS-in-JS or don't like using Tailwind, also great! I'm in that position too, I don't like Tailwind. But I still avoid cascade and basic element selectors and there are ways to basically eliminate most cascading styles from your codebase and eliminate most cascade-caused bugs even if you aren't going to use a pre-processor at all, and it's good to at least consider removing those cascading styles.

My only critique of Tailwind I would bring here is that sometimes I get the feeling that Tailwind advocates think that Tailwind invented this idea of component-based CSS, and it really didn't. But that's neither here nor there, and if someone is using Tailwind and it works for them, great. Life is way too short for me to argue with someone using a technology that they enjoy. Honestly, same with the cascade -- I think it can lead to long-term maintenance problems, but if you like it, fine.

However, if you're using CSS and hate it, and you also don't want to use Tailwind, then give BEM a try.

But BEM doesn't interact with the cascade. If you have two BEM selectors (or a BEM selector and non-BEM selector) that match an element and set the same property, the cascade algorithm still applies to determine what to set the property to.

Sure, but the idea with BEM is that you generally don't have situations where the result of that algorithm is confusing or unexpected. Or at least that's been my experience, even on large codebases. I generally don't run into situations where styles overload each other in weird ways when I'm using BEM (others' experiences might vary).

You could throw the same criticism at Tailwind -- Tailwind can still expose you to cascade issues, not all Tailwind classes are single-level selectors under the hood and not all Tailwind classes only target one property. At the end of the day this is all compiling down to raw CSS, so in neither situation have you actually eliminated the cascade. But with both BEM and Tailwind you are much less likely to see those situations, and when they do arise they are less likely to introduce long-term maintenance problems and are more likely to be easy to address/encapsulate. If you run into cascade bugs with Tailwind, it's probably something you fix in like one file, instead of needing to search through five.

BEM doesn't technically interact with anything, it's just a style of writing CSS. There's literally no technology behind it, it is just a naming convention. But in practice, using a naming convention mitigates or eliminates a large number of cascade issues.

Do you have a CSS component framework that you can recommend for use with BEM?

I could link you to a few (I think Bootstrap adopted BEM at some point, Material Design Lite I think uses a variant of it), but I can't recommend them with confidence because generally I don't use extensive style frameworks when I work on large applications. I feel like CSS frameworks are largely useful for bootstrapping projects and for keeping control of large projects where styling starts to break down. A lot of projects I work on are past the point where I need the bootstrapping help, and BEM itself helps me keep control of the CSS code as the projects grow so I don't need to have a strict framework to help me organize everything.

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In general though, I would actually suggest that you can kind of use anything if you're not planning on forking the component library. Most of these 3rd-party libraries you're not going to be restyling, so long-term maintenance and scalability isn't really a concern, you're never touching that code.

And BEM is just a naming convention, so if you're pulling in a React component and it has a hook for you to attach your own classes, then attach a BEM-style class, otherwise pass in the styling information into the props the way that most JS components want. I've used BEM with React components, with Material design, with Angular components, etc... I don't know, I haven't really run into issues. I've even worked on a codebase that was a mixture of BEM CSS, 3rd-party CSS, and Tailwind. It was fine, I didn't notice any major issues. Typically 3rd-party component dependencies are not a major source of cascade bugs in my experience, but maybe I've just been lucky. Most components I've seen lock down their styles to the point where it's kind of a pain to even try to override them with CSS, and the specificity required to do so forces you to effectively isolate those overrides anyway.

Whatever component framework you're using will have its own customization API, and in my experience that usually won't be handled through CSS. If it is handled through CSS, it will probably be handled by attaching classes, and then when you attach those classes you can use BEM. The major annoyance in my experience is that (for me) BEM often works better than whatever customization system that the 3rd-party components is using and I get frustrated that I'm mixing more straightforward CSS that's easier to debug and design in-browser in with whatever property-based thing that the components expose. But I don't usually think I run into many bugs?

What BEM helps with is dealing with cascade, code organization, naming, and debugging/search. With a 3rd-party component framework, most of that stuff is out of your control, so just use whatever the framework wants and then use BEM for the stuff that is in your control.

If you have to do some kind of CSS-based override of a 3rd-party component that isn't being handled through a component-specific API, wrap it in a BEM-style class for your actual component so that it's a one-time customization:

  .Input__Username .some_component_depencency input {
      /* This is not ideal, but (imo) you'll still effectively never really see cascade bugs from doing it this way, and specificity will rarely be a concern. */
   }

One thing that is nice about BEM is that because your own CSS is being scoped to specific named components, it actually becomes a bit easier to have a lot of 1st-party CSS living alongside 3rd-party CSS and know that your CSS is not going to break the 3rd-party CSS. So I tend to worry a lot less about what other parts of the code/dependencies are using when I'm using BEM, because I more confident while writing BEM that I'm not introducing bugs into the other CSS.

That was really helpful and cleared up some notions I had. Thanks

Thanks for writing this, I've been complaining and trying to get attention on this problem for somewhere close to a year and I feel like with so much of the completely uncritical coverage of passkeys I was disconnected from reality or something.

Portability is a huge issue for passkeys and the lack of communication about it as well as the lack of prioritization is holding passkeys back.

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A few weeks ago there was a virtual tech summit for the FIDO alliance which had a tech-talk on the state of portability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mje6J2IMRTY

It is from what I can tell the only resource going over plans for portability to this level of detail. I'm hugely grateful to the presenters who even went out of their way to answer a few of my questions when I emailed them -- seriously, thank you.

But it's frustrating to have questions about portability years after passkeys became a thing and to have a 30 minute video be the best resource online for learning more. Hopefully that will change in the future, my understanding is that a rough draft spec is coming soon. But the process up until this point has been frustratingly vague and impossible to follow from the outside, and I'm still left asking why portability wasn't considered a pre-condition to launching passkeys and advertising them to ordinary users for regular usage.

I'm hoping things get better once the draft spec is released, I want to be wrong about passkeys. I want them to be something I can support and advocate for. It's because passkeys have so much potential that it's frustrating seeing them fall over in this way, and it's frustrating to see trends that make me feel like the entire standard is being developed mostly by companies without the kind of serious input from user-advocates or transparency about spec process that is necessary for a full password replacement.

You can already export and reimportant passkeys in Proton Pass and as soon as an industry-wide export format is standardized, we'll support that too.

KeepassXC too, and I think Strongbox(?) is trying to support interop with 3rd-parties -- if anyone from Strongbox is around, you should add support for Proton Pass's format.

That's been the encouraging part in this -- 3rd-party passkey providers stepping up and saying that export/interop is important to them and that they're not going to launch without it regardless of where the standard currently is -- so again, thanks for taking that stance :)