 People ask me why I still use vanilla HTML, CSS, and occasionally JavaScript on my YouTube channel. Where's the React content? What about some CSS and JS? When are you going to make a video using Tailwind, Bootstrap, Interior UI, etc? There are two reasons that I stick with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript though. First off, it's really important to understand the core languages that all of those things are built on top of. And second, it's much easier to take something that I make with regular old CSS and incorporate it into your workflow of choice than for people to try and turn something I write using Tailwind or some CSS in JS solution, which they're not familiar with, and implement that with however they're writing their CSS. But I can't put enough emphasis on that first point that I just mentioned. Knowing the core language is so important. People are often told learn React because it's popular. I see it all the time on social media and even within my Discord community. The problem though is people listen to that advice and they go out and they learn React, but they never take the time to learn JavaScript first. And while they're learning React, the tutorials and courses they follow are using Bootstrap or Tailwind and they never actually learn CSS. Quick side note, it's painfully obvious when people are using Tailwind having never actually learned CSS first and it's doubly painful to debug. There's nothing wrong with Tailwind but you can't use it without a decent understanding of CSS. So please learn that first. But going back to what I was just talking about learning the core languages, when people skip that step it leads to questions like this one right here, which were on a recent video of mine where I was looking at doing like a sticky header and how you could get it to change when you scroll down a little bit. Now the focus of that video was on about eight lines of JavaScript to get that actually working. Now I'm not here to judge at all. I understand that if you're a beginner and you want to incorporate what I was teaching there into a React project that you're working on, it might not be super straightforward and there's probably a few tweaks that you are going to have to make. The problem is when you've only used React, you don't know the parts of the code that you're writing that are React specific and the parts that are regular JavaScript. And I'm not speaking from some high and mighty spot here either. I made the same mistake but the previous generation's similar mistake, where I learned jQuery before getting into JavaScript itself. I think that the reason that I felt into this trap is the same reason that people get into modern JavaScript frameworks early on as well. React tutorials are going to show you how to make a website and make things work, whereas a JavaScript tutorial might just get bogged down in theory and you're not really sure what the point of everything you're learning is. I ran into this exact same thing with jQuery. jQuery is basically all about DOM manipulation. So learning it was about making things happen rather than going over how to make yet another type of loop in JavaScript. It felt more meaningful and like I was making some progress because I was actually building things while I was learning it and getting things to happen and it was much more exciting and it felt much more impactful. But ultimately, learning jQuery first held me back for a long time. I would have been better off getting a good understanding of JavaScript first and then using jQuery to help speed things up and improve my workflow. But then I also thought, what's the point in learning JavaScript first? Like most people, I never thought jQuery would die, so knowing just that would be completely fine. Just like today, I'm sure people figure React is never going to go away. And just to give an idea of how big jQuery was, it's still currently being used on over 77% of all websites. React, for comparison's sake, is being used on about 3.3%. jQuery was basically the king and it didn't even really have any challengers like React has today. And then one day it was basically kicked to the curb. Things come and go, trends change, new better things pop up and the industry shifts. All the while, the core languages that these things are built on top of are always there and slowly improving over time. Now yes, learning things like React and Tailwind can help you be more employable, but that never means that the expense of having a strong understanding of the core languages. And if you enjoyed this video, the script was actually based on a recent newsletter I sent out where I often talk about more general things like this rather than very CSS specific things. I also share all the recent stuff I was up to share other people's really cool things that I stumble across. It's a weekly newsletter. It comes out every Sunday. And if that sounds interesting to you, the link to it is just down below. If not, you can watch this video right here instead. And with that, I'd like to thank my enablers of awesome, James Enrico, Michael Simon, Tim and Johnny, as well as all my other patrons with their monthly support. And of course, until next time, don't forget to make a unicorn on the internet just a little bit more awesome.