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CSS is DOOMed

nielsleenheer.com

81–90 of 120 posts

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#81

This feels like one of those “because we can” projects that accidentally reveals where the platform is going. CSS started as purely declarative styling, but between things like conditionals, math functions, and now these rendering tricks, it’s slowly creeping into “programmable system” territory. Not because it’s the right tool for it, but because browsers are becoming the real runtime. The interesting question isn’t…

The question is really about where the boundary between presentation (CSS) and interactivity (JavaScript) lies.

For static content like documents the distinction is easy to determine. When you think about applications, widgets, and other interactive elements the line starts to blur.

Before things like flex layout, positioning content with a 100% height was hard, resulting in JavaScript being used for layout and positioning.

Positioning a dropdown menu, tooltip, or other content required JavaScript. Now you can specify the anchor position of the element via CSS properties. Determining which anchor position to use also required JavaScript, but with things like if() can now be done directly in CSS.

Implementing disclosure elements had to be done with a mix of JavaScript and CSS. Now you can use the details/summary elements and CSS to style the open/close states.

Animation effects when opening an element, on hover, etc. such as easing in colour transitions can easily be done in CSS now. Plus, with the reduced motion media query you can gate those effects to that user preference in CSS.

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#82
Is this a proof of how great CSS is?

Or is it proof that CSS has "jumped the shark", adding in a plethora of features that have no place in a "stylesheet"?

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#83

Is this a proof of how great CSS is? Or is it proof that CSS has "jumped the shark", adding in a plethora of features that have no place in a "stylesheet"?

Yeah. I came here to say: "this is awesome, but it's not evidence that css is awesome".

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#84
CSS is /the/ spec to look at to understand how awful something designed by committee gets.

In web specs closely rivaled by SVG.

You can pick which one is uglier and you'll be right.

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#86

CSS is /the/ spec to look at to understand how awful something designed by committee gets. In web specs closely rivaled by SVG. You can pick which one is uglier and you'll be right.

Be honest, did you just reply to the title and the title along even skipping the other comments?

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#87
While standalone CSS is not yet Turing complete, I worry about the new attack vector categories opened up by moving it towards that state. Already I believe attackers have a choice to spread the attack payload between CSS, HTML and JavaScript to evade current detectors and analysis at the network borders, and evade CSP's since we're well into undecidability territory, like using CSS attribute selectors if the CSP allows external images or fonts. But I'm far from proficient at web browser red teaming. Is this worry unfounded?

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#88
just a small note on this very cool implementation and write up. you wrote modeling tools and animation stuff has camera that moves around.

i think ultimately, there also the world moves aroun the player and cameras are just a concept to make the frustrum etc (maybe modern tools do it differently, im a little out of date)

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#89
I feel there should be a gov dep where all the "i turned this into DOOM" folks get hired, to build the next spicy interplanetary propulsion systems. They are clearly needing an exotic task to stop twiddling their fingers.

Re: CSS is DOOMed

#90
post #86

CSS is /the/ spec to look at to understand how awful something designed by committee gets. In web specs closely rivaled by SVG. You can pick which one is uglier and you'll be right.

Be honest, did you just reply to the title and the title along even skipping the other comments?

I opened the article and read the first paragraph. Then skimmed the rest.

As others pointed out: the fact you can do this in CSS tells you everything you need to know if you consider what CSS is for. Even w/o ever looking at the spec or understanding how it came to be.

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