I really do appreciate the nesting they've added but looking at it as a whole, CSS is a really strange and in my humble opinion, a terrible language. Perhaps I'm just holding it wrong, but it's just so complicated and messy, it sometimes feels like you're just arranging arcane runes in different ways until you make it sort of work for you. It's both a system for styling text based on inheritance, and a layout system for block and inline elements, nested recursively but without inheritance, only containment. I think it was a mistake to combine styling and layout, and I don't feel like adding more and more capabilities to something fundamentally broken can fix it.
CSSdev has been the bread and butter of my last 10 years of work, and I still have the feeling that CSS as a language is never designed, just expanded.
A series of modules that are bolted on top of existing properties without actually improving on them, simply "well, here's another way of doing the same thing" often in ways contradicting each other (see the way the box model works in "display" vs "flex" layout) or just slightly diverging in ways that make extremely hard to debug them (e.g. how gap works in "flex" vs "grid" layouts[1]).
The awkward point-based cascading system means that once a layout is written it's basically frozen, unless you use some convoluted native or js-based encapsulation systems which once in a while gets leaky and, who knows, your component topbar font-weight mysteriously goes from "thin" to "extrabold" or your mobile menu appears even on your desktop breakpoints.
I disagree, I think most of these opinions I see about CSS are from people that haven't taken the time to learn it and particularly to understand the cascade.
Many years ago I did a very deep dive into the CSS specs as I was researching for a new implementation and it struck me as well designed for its purpose of separating style from the semantics of markup.
IMO the cascade is the exact problem with CSS. It worked fine when all it was dealing with was super simple documents with a few rules here and there, as soon as we started making applications the cascade causes endless headaches, and most modern methods of handling CSS like modules or libraries like Tailwind are made specifically to avoid cascade/specificity issues. Conceptually CSS is not really all that complicated, but in practice when you have dozens or even hundreds of CSS files for an entire app, it simply becomes a herculean nightmare to deal with and to wrap your head around.
It has been my experience that those that complained the loudest about CSS, expected to know it without actually studying or learning it. They already know a "real" language, so why should they have to study a "toy" styling language.
When it comes down to it, making a great looking and maintainable page is just as much work and planning as building a good backend codebase. Neither one just happens.
I think developers nowadays being coerced into being a jack of all trades, master of none contributes to CSS being the least studied and practiced by full stack devs. Such devs would also be much more inclined to put their time into, for example, learning and practicing databases rather than improving their skills regarding UIs, and for webdev that means skimping on CSS while just doing the bare minimum, mediocre thing to get it working.
I is certainly true for me that I didn't take the time to learn the intricacies of CSS behavior and I still think the cascading properties are the worst feature, namely concepts like specificity. It is hard to keep a mental model of styling rules and at some point it is just degrades to trial and error.
Nobody came up with a better alternative though (apart from the many dialects that transpile to CSS again).
Video games became a lot better when developers stopped saying, "You just haven't taken the time to learn it and don't understand it", and started saying, "That's my fault for designing it that way. Let me redesign it so that it's accessible to everyone in my target audience". I wish programming languages would be humble enough to do the same (although many are!).
All that complexity is a trap. It creates a need for people that have spent the unreasonable time to grasp a poor design, and then they have the secrets that others simply do not have the time to waste learning yet another poorly designed reindeer game. That complexity eats time, energy and is pointless. CSS is a shit show of poor design, poor documentation, and secrets.
The problem with CSS is the C: Cascading. Which is what you are calling "inheritance"
Cascading is a nice feature for documents, that present data in the same way over and over. It not good for anything interactive. A lot of modern styling techniques are all about making CSS _not_ cascade. UI components (which is the majority of modern frontend dev) is basically a pre-requisite to achieve that.
The layout system is a bit of a separate discussion, and it is a mess yes, but mostly for backwards compatibility. If we could live in a world where all layout is default flexbox or grid and never mix inline with non-inline in the same container it would work out just fine. In fact that is _exactly_ how it works in React Native and it doesn't cause problems there. Styling in React Native also doesn't cascade which also makes it a lot easier to manage.
> I think it was a mistake to combine styling and layout (...)
Anyone who ever did any work on UI development knows very well that styling and layout are coupled and interdependent. I mean, think about it. Text string length, text size, text overflowing/breaking/clipping, margins, etc. You change border sizes/padding/spacing and the space left for child content changes as well. How exactly do you uncouple something that's fundamentally coupled?
I think that's true, but I think there's a more fundamental mistake in thinking that you can uncouple the HTML structure from layout, particularly when the layout rules make explicit reference to "parents" and "siblings".
The dream of CSS was that you could decouple styling from semantics. Your HTML would tell you what the page meant, and then your CSS would let you present it in whatever format was prettiest, and you could swap out CSS to let different users view it differently. But in practice, what happened was that the page ended up meaning nothing - it was just an app, a way for the user to accomplish a task, so instead of <h1> through <h6> and <p> and <em> and <cite>, everything is a <div>. The very concept of CSS was flawed, because we still thought of websites as documents at the time it was invented, rather than as an app platform.
That's perhaps why newer reactive frameworks like React or Jetpack Compose ditch this separation. The style in React is to just include CSS inline on the components. In Compose, you have Modifiers that let you specify the styling as explicit attributes on the component. They admit that they're building a UI framework, not a document overlay, and get rid of the content/presentation separation as a result. It's all presentation.
This is all true. But it is what we have. I’ve found myself wondering if a model with stronger conceptual integrity could be designed and use CSS as a compilation target. For example, with container queries and calcs you could probably implement a more coherent layout system with just math.
Unfortunately the preprocessor languages we have just add even more half-baked ideas on top of the half-baked ideas already in CSS, according to the principle that syntax sugar = good.
Tailwind is the closest popular thing to that and it's no wonder it's become so liked. Not so much in terms of providing a better layout system, but it just removes so much of what's wrong with CSS, at least for those who don't like it.
I haven't seen anything out there that provides an alternative but it does seem like CSS has almost added enough features you could actually build something that works. Alternatively it could be done through higher level abstractions built on something like React: <Flex>, <Grid> etc.
> "I think it was a mistake to combine styling and layout"
Perhaps because we can have different styles of layout, it fits with CSS better than you say. Carefully designed padding, margins and negative space is both a style and layout consideration.
Containers contain styles, but the container's relationship with other containers may tie with presentation such as border thickness, colour, shadows, and let's not forget animation and interaction effects on containers. Maintaining control of these aspects in one place makes good sense to me.
CSS1 circa 1996 was (practically) styling only. It's main purpose was decluttering HTML of all the font tags etc.
CSS2 included limited layout, but support in popular broswers lagged for so long that practically nobody learned the standard, just the vibe styling voodoo to get certain browsers to kinda partially work.
I read up until the css color picker (which doesn’t work in Safari), clicked view source, and then scrolled… and scrolled… and scrolled… until my eyes glazed over and I tapped the back button to get here. It just looks so messy and hacky, but might just be me.
i think css is one of the most brilliant languages
but you have to separate the specific properties (float) and the semantics of the language
the selector system is incredible, in a way i can’t quite describe why but it feels similar to programming in prolog
inheritance is kind of stupid for most things yes, but `all: initial` is a easy fix / debug
to me the part i love is the debugger (dev tools) and the ability to plop down code where ever and it just works, code organization is just writing good selectors
unfortunately i don’t get to do this professionally so the largest css files i work with are 1000 lines, and usually no shared libs, but i find it extremely fun to work with
“I believe a lot of the negativity towards CSS stems from not really knowing how to use it. Many developers kind of just skip learning the CSS fundamentals in favor of the more interesting Java- and TypeScript, and then go on to complain about a styling language they don’t understand.”
from the article is talking about people like you, who refuse to learn something properly but have the arrogance to think they know better.
I don't have the time to spend weeks for every little tool to study its details and edge cases, I simply want to use them and get stuff done. If a tool is actively counterintuitive and hostile to its user, then it is flawed and it is no wonder users will seek out alternatives.
i will say that though i am predisposed to appreciate and agree with an article like this, any sort of value proposition around "some users don't want javascript" just doesn't... hit for me. and, mind you: i am a card-carrying arch user and have spent more time messing with browser scripting and web crawling, and am more of a True Believer than most. it's just such a niche user preference that i think it should largely be simply ignored. yes, i would love the world to be better for the "noscript" universe, no, i don't think that any individual "grassroots" effort should stake itself on "no javascript" being any part of its utility. i think there are a million other reasons why CSS should win out that are more compelling than an appeal to what feels, extremely ironically, like a callback to the "but 10% of your users use IE6" days... all in all, yes: this is somewhat of a minor point wrt. to the article (which btw i think is great), but i am just calling the "trend", such as it is / has been, for what (i think) it is.
The drawcard for me is that I can do in a few bytes of declarative CSS things that take many lines of imperative JS to get right, with fewer weird misbehaviours, fewer framework compatibility issues, and a lower time-to-interactive. Working under noscript conditions is just a cherry on the cake.
fwiw, i've been using the internet with noscript and i find it perfectly usable
for any sites that do need js, i simply enable it for them from the extension, so it never gets in the way with sites i use regularly
it's pretty nice for performance/battery and security
have you ever tried living with noscript for over a week? i feel like your perspective could be a bit mislead, because i felt the exact same way as you before i started using noscript
I have been using NoScript for years and I find calling it "perfectly usable" is a bit of a stretch at least for my use case. I can only see it being "perfectly usable" if you only visit mostly the same sites most of the time and have already enabled whatever you need to enable.
I visit new websites all the time because of HN and Reddit, and without JavaScript many sites just don't work or look too broken for me to want to read anything. Unless we collectively decide to stop using buttons instead of anchors for navigation and stop having external, unrelated JavaScript blocking the actual site (that, sometimes funny enough, doesn't require JavaScript to function), it's not going to get any better.
I went through a phase where I think JavaScript is bad and have used CSS instead of JavaScript for a lot of things (mostly because I enjoy writing CSS). The thing is if you have ever tried developing any substantial and moderately complex feature for an actual product with CSS instead of JavaScript, while keeping them readable, maintainable and scalable, you will realize that they are good for different things and talking about them in a mutually exclusive way isn't helpful.
Both CSS and JavaScript are constantly evolving, I agree with you that there are now things that we should do with CSS instead of JavaScript and increasingly more so.
> fwiw, i've been using the internet with noscript and i find it perfectly usable
Genuine question though: you just run a ton of apps instead, right? Windows apps, iOS apps, whatever. Right? Because you still want to use (and not just "look at") Facebook or WhatsApp or BSky or Drive or CoD:BO6 or... everything. And all that stuff runs in an environment with the same privacy-compromising power (generally much more dangerous, frankly).
I just don't see a situation where "use noscript" doesn't really just mean "use your phone so you don't have to use your browser". I mean, why bother? You're not winning anything.
(Quite frankly most of the people I see in this argument eventually admit this straight up: "no javascript" really means "no Google" to them, and their goal isn't privacy at all except as a proxy thing; it's the destruction of the World Wide Web as a platform in favor of Apple's offerings.)
that’s great! for the record, i am “pro noscript” (whatever that means). and i hope you didn’t take my comment personally. i think it’s more round what others will find compelling. for me, personally, i view “noscript” as valuable per se. i just don’t think it resonates well beyond our nerd-dom, such as it is. love the article brw, and feel ashamed that ancillary stuff like this dominates the discussion on these topics… :)
Same here, I have noscript almost always on. The problem is some things don't work without JS. Google and Bing search, youtube, even duckduckgo in plane FireFox. The later works in Tor browser, that's what I'm usually using. I usually skip on most other things that require JS to drive blinking ads.
They mention the users who don’t want JavaScript as an aside, but most of the post is devoted to just showing the CSS functionality off.
The other motivation mentioned is performance. But they don’t belabor the whole motivation thing anyway. IMO that’s a good, focusing on showing off the tech seems more productive anyway.
Well, I'm one who defaults to browsing with JavaScript off and turning it on only when strictly necessary. For me, the advantages of no JS are so compelling that I can't see me changing unless some major paradigm shift in browsing were to take place to upend the advantage.
It's not JavaScript that I'm against but the many abuses that websites inflict on users—privacy violations, pages of many tens of megabytes long but which only contain some 10k or so of text, the incredibility slow page load times, etc., etc.
As far as I'm concerned CSS is capable of just about anything I require of a webpage.
It seems a shame that not more users are aware of browsing sans JS with a button to turn it on and off. After experiencing the advantages it's quickly habit-forming. The increase in speed of page loads alone justifies killing JS.
I agree; I don't find the noscript-ians to be useful or worth targeting.
At the same time, I want to emphasize more strongly the flip side that I think you don't at but don't go much I to: I do find that writing less code & using the platform is enormously valuable! Doing less & letting the browser do the thing is a very nice win.
"Doing less & letting the browser do the thing is a very nice win."
If only they would do it nice and consistently, I would agree. Sadly they don't. On one plattform you get sliders in this color who pop in when the mouse moves there, on another you have fixed size sliders of a different color and style. Impossible to make a coherent style like this.
I learned CSS 20 years ago. My strong opinion is that it should be renamed Crappy Style Sheets, but that would take away from its primary fault, that it's cascading. As we learned in many other things, "inheritance" is not a great idea. Especially for something that gets applied globally, by a team of five people. "I will now adjust this thing over here, which will mess up everything my colleague is doing over there" is not a good feature. Its main feature is to give you complex rules how to overrule a certain rule. As a feature it's a a headache, when that's what you base everything around, it's bad. It gives you complex ways to target things, and over time it became even more complex. If you're a sane person, you've learned to avoid most of these otherwise you'll end up with .foo > .bar:nth-child(2n) ~ .baz . Then you will adjust that and come full circle to my argument, which is that it will break Mark's completely unrelated thing.
At the same time doing the simplest imaginable layout was a headache. I've done it, and it was interesting as in, this is a challenge and I am taking it head on, but it never should've been a challenge. Things have improved exponentially here, but it should've been the idea all along. Not how to cascade rules.
All other criticism, the syntax etc. is nitpicky and not important. As long as it's allowing you to do something useful without much fuss, I am ok with any syntax. But it didn't and it never did. Making a webpage layout should not be a full time job.
I love the fact that CSS is cascading; inheritance is a great idea, "where it fits". The main reason I like the cascading in CSS is because it is inherently a tree, and when it comes to parsing documents (using context free or non context free languages) a tree is very often a good fit. That and humans have long used trees (abstract or otherwise) to organise knowledge.
And since documents "fit" trees way more often than not; I'd say CSS is a good fit.
I learned it 30 years ago and back then and for some time it was not clear whether it will prevail.
There used to be DSSSL and JSS. The former came out if the SGML world, like HTML itself, and it was kind if the obvious solution to adapt it for the web. The latter used JavaScript syntax and was Netscape's favourite, which also made sense, them being JavaScript's inventors.
(A maybe interesting aside to this story is that JavaScript actually predates CSS, at least if we go by the dates each shipped in a browser.)
I remember the my 'one day'. I was messing around making a podcast app awhile back and thinking it shouldn't be hard to make a floating footer in css that's (1) always at the bottom, (2) always visible, (3) doesn't permanently occlude content and (4) doesn't require any hacks or artifacts eg. putting a same sized buffer in the scrolling content to handle item #3. Turns out it's just not possible. Great system.
> The worst thing about CSS is that a lot of people don't bother learning it
How dare people use CSS without learning in-depth all 20+ specifications! It's an outrage!
When people have problems using a tool, you should look at the tool rather than blaming the people. People aren't going to change. You don't tell people to be more careful using a bandsaw; you install safety features.
You obviously don't need to learn 20+ years of specs, just as with any programming language, markup language there is some stuff you need to use it in a modern way, the other stuff you can pick up as time goes on.
> How dare people use CSS without learning in-depth all 20+ specifications! It's an outrage!
Is strange reaction to:
> ... then have a strong opinion after they were forced to use it for a day.
There is not problem with using something without understanding all complex rules. Point is about forming strong opinion based on superficial knowledge.
I didn't realize that nesting is official now, last time I checked it was still a proposal. Nice!
CSS has a lot of weirdness but I feel like it's been following the trajectory of Javascript toward becoming decent language. Flexbox and the :has selector, and now nesting, cover a lot of the pain points I've had over the years.
I think that if you want to follow WAI-ARIA practices, the aria-selected, tabindex and aria-controls need to be updated via JS when the active tab changes? I'd love to be wrong about that.
Accessibility is often an afterthought. And, sometimes there's an assumption that by working with HTML/CSS directly, accessibility comes built in. Just Something to keep in mind when choosing an approach.
I am aware that people who read the blog might base parts of their websites on my examples, so I definitely want to make sure they're accessible as to not cause a negative ripple effect on the web.
I don't have a background in accessibility, but I try to do the best I can. I try out what I make with various accessibility tools (e.g. keyboard navigation, screenreaders), and also read up on how things should be handled.
For the radio tabs specifically - they are keyboard navigable, work with screenreaders, and follow the tabbing to content practice mentioned in the WAI-ARIA example[0].
Thanks! Sorry if I came off as brash, time has been tight recently. You've already put a lot of work into a very informative article, and it's appreciated. The outlook is solid. I'd like to find an opportunity to revisit some of my own code with your writing in mind.
Part of the reason for mentioning the radio-tabs is because I was working on my own implementation for a personal project a few weeks ago. My goal was specifically using the role="tab"/role="tabpanel" pattern, but my read of the guidance left me feeling like I was trapped with using JS to set those. Since it was timeboxed, I bailed out to augmenting it with JS for and moved on.
My hope was maybe somebody on HN with more of a background on accessibility could interject some thoughts here.
I don't know about those radio tabs specifically, but your intuition is correct. Many of the ARIA APG (component)patterns require JavaScript to update tab index and ARIA properties for full implementation. Focus management and key-control are two problem spaces that are common across many patterns and require JavaScript.
Focus management:
Focus scopes and restoring focus requires JavaScript. Complex UI components like combo box, grids, and trees require dynamically adjusting tab index and focus. Combo Box requires managing accessibility tree focus separately from DOM focus. Modals implementing focus scopes and restoring focus scopes requires JavaScript.
Key controls:
The ARIA APG patterns call for differences in tab and arrow key control from what the browser would supply. Patterns that involve list of groups use tab to navigate between groups and arrows to navigate within groups.
Thanks for the input. The keyboard control piece is a good call-out.
Personally, I don't have my access to my normal computer/environment at the moment, so I've just been trying to go by the spec when necessary and hope for the best until I do.
Did you read the article? The author specifically addresses accessibility in multiple places, including taking extra steps to work around browser bugs [0].
Given how un-accesible this blog post is (the contrast is quite a crime against humanity, as someone who does web dev for a dsiability charity (well communcity interest company but similar)), I wouldn't go to this for a source on this.
could you give any examples of how the page's accessibility could be improved - apart from your dislike of the background color
you're calling the post un-accessible and telling people to not use it as a source - i'd like to know why you think that, and if there's any way to improve the accessibility
I know like 10-15 different languages, and CSS is by far the hardest to read and understand. It's easier to understand x86 assembly than CSS. CSS is basically pre-tokenized input that drives a renderer, but they sort of went halfway and didn't really make it real tokens or really human-writable.
I'd say that it should take the place of ASN.1 in the RFCs as an example of "what not to do."
How many of those languages are declarative, or domain specific?
There's no use comparing CSS and assembly. It betrays a shallow understanding of CSS. Points to ponder:
- Assembly is superlatively imperative while CSS is the opposite. The difference can be jarring for some. It's commonly felt in day-to-day frontend work that switching to CSS (declarative) from almost anything else (imperative) -- JavaScript, PHP, etc. -- requires a significant mental shift, though it does get easier with experience.
- Lot of the vocabulary and concepts used in CSS come from outside the computing world, namely design and publishing. It's somehow a rarely shared factoid, but it's a hint at how too far away from Kansas we are to be making fair comparisons.
- A pervasive mistake that coders make (and unfortunately a lot of CSS teaching material out there too) is to approach CSS as a set of explicit, atomic instructions -- a fair coder-y assumption, but a bad mental model that leads to frustration. Understand that these instructions can affect one another; some switch entire layout algorithms[0] in a given scope, changing how other instructions behave (predictably).
> I know like 10-15 different languages, and CSS is by far the hardest to read and understand.
CSS is hard to know, even if you know 15 languages.
I can understand many programming languages and write in a subset of many of their features, but I wouldn't claim to know them. That would require a monumental amount of day to day effort, in my opinion (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth).
To me, the best way to understand CSS is to evaluate it after rendering, and I have been writing it for decades.
I do wish we would start to move further towards a sane set of front-end application (logic) technologies (I don't think the current leader, Typescript NextJS is it)
But I do appreciate that CSS is starting to feel a lot more sane these days.
Readit News
A series of modules that are bolted on top of existing properties without actually improving on them, simply "well, here's another way of doing the same thing" often in ways contradicting each other (see the way the box model works in "display" vs "flex" layout) or just slightly diverging in ways that make extremely hard to debug them (e.g. how gap works in "flex" vs "grid" layouts[1]).
The awkward point-based cascading system means that once a layout is written it's basically frozen, unless you use some convoluted native or js-based encapsulation systems which once in a while gets leaky and, who knows, your component topbar font-weight mysteriously goes from "thin" to "extrabold" or your mobile menu appears even on your desktop breakpoints.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/gap
Many years ago I did a very deep dive into the CSS specs as I was researching for a new implementation and it struck me as well designed for its purpose of separating style from the semantics of markup.
When it comes down to it, making a great looking and maintainable page is just as much work and planning as building a good backend codebase. Neither one just happens.
Nobody came up with a better alternative though (apart from the many dialects that transpile to CSS again).
Cascading is a nice feature for documents, that present data in the same way over and over. It not good for anything interactive. A lot of modern styling techniques are all about making CSS _not_ cascade. UI components (which is the majority of modern frontend dev) is basically a pre-requisite to achieve that.
The layout system is a bit of a separate discussion, and it is a mess yes, but mostly for backwards compatibility. If we could live in a world where all layout is default flexbox or grid and never mix inline with non-inline in the same container it would work out just fine. In fact that is _exactly_ how it works in React Native and it doesn't cause problems there. Styling in React Native also doesn't cascade which also makes it a lot easier to manage.
Anyone who ever did any work on UI development knows very well that styling and layout are coupled and interdependent. I mean, think about it. Text string length, text size, text overflowing/breaking/clipping, margins, etc. You change border sizes/padding/spacing and the space left for child content changes as well. How exactly do you uncouple something that's fundamentally coupled?
The dream of CSS was that you could decouple styling from semantics. Your HTML would tell you what the page meant, and then your CSS would let you present it in whatever format was prettiest, and you could swap out CSS to let different users view it differently. But in practice, what happened was that the page ended up meaning nothing - it was just an app, a way for the user to accomplish a task, so instead of <h1> through <h6> and <p> and <em> and <cite>, everything is a <div>. The very concept of CSS was flawed, because we still thought of websites as documents at the time it was invented, rather than as an app platform.
That's perhaps why newer reactive frameworks like React or Jetpack Compose ditch this separation. The style in React is to just include CSS inline on the components. In Compose, you have Modifiers that let you specify the styling as explicit attributes on the component. They admit that they're building a UI framework, not a document overlay, and get rid of the content/presentation separation as a result. It's all presentation.
Unfortunately the preprocessor languages we have just add even more half-baked ideas on top of the half-baked ideas already in CSS, according to the principle that syntax sugar = good.
I haven't seen anything out there that provides an alternative but it does seem like CSS has almost added enough features you could actually build something that works. Alternatively it could be done through higher level abstractions built on something like React: <Flex>, <Grid> etc.
Perhaps because we can have different styles of layout, it fits with CSS better than you say. Carefully designed padding, margins and negative space is both a style and layout consideration.
Containers contain styles, but the container's relationship with other containers may tie with presentation such as border thickness, colour, shadows, and let's not forget animation and interaction effects on containers. Maintaining control of these aspects in one place makes good sense to me.
CSS2 included limited layout, but support in popular broswers lagged for so long that practically nobody learned the standard, just the vibe styling voodoo to get certain browsers to kinda partially work.
but you have to separate the specific properties (float) and the semantics of the language
the selector system is incredible, in a way i can’t quite describe why but it feels similar to programming in prolog
inheritance is kind of stupid for most things yes, but `all: initial` is a easy fix / debug
to me the part i love is the debugger (dev tools) and the ability to plop down code where ever and it just works, code organization is just writing good selectors
unfortunately i don’t get to do this professionally so the largest css files i work with are 1000 lines, and usually no shared libs, but i find it extremely fun to work with
from the article is talking about people like you, who refuse to learn something properly but have the arrogance to think they know better.
Here's a better explanation of the hostility towards CSS.
Nested flexbox had bugs in IE11, which wasn't end of lifed until 2022. The nested CSS in the article came out in December 2023.
CSS first came out in 1996.
The current state is much improved, but don't pretend there wasn't a solid 20+ years of sucking before that.
Deep down inside, however, I miss DSSSL.
for any sites that do need js, i simply enable it for them from the extension, so it never gets in the way with sites i use regularly
it's pretty nice for performance/battery and security
have you ever tried living with noscript for over a week? i feel like your perspective could be a bit mislead, because i felt the exact same way as you before i started using noscript
disclaimer: i'm the author of the blogpost
I visit new websites all the time because of HN and Reddit, and without JavaScript many sites just don't work or look too broken for me to want to read anything. Unless we collectively decide to stop using buttons instead of anchors for navigation and stop having external, unrelated JavaScript blocking the actual site (that, sometimes funny enough, doesn't require JavaScript to function), it's not going to get any better.
I went through a phase where I think JavaScript is bad and have used CSS instead of JavaScript for a lot of things (mostly because I enjoy writing CSS). The thing is if you have ever tried developing any substantial and moderately complex feature for an actual product with CSS instead of JavaScript, while keeping them readable, maintainable and scalable, you will realize that they are good for different things and talking about them in a mutually exclusive way isn't helpful.
Both CSS and JavaScript are constantly evolving, I agree with you that there are now things that we should do with CSS instead of JavaScript and increasingly more so.
I have been living without Javascript, and without a mouse, for over 20 years
When I began using the web, Javascript did not exist
Extracting text for reading and downloading files keeps getting easier every year
I generally avoid using a browser to make HTTP requests; I sometimes use a text-only browser to read saved HTML (offline)
Genuine question though: you just run a ton of apps instead, right? Windows apps, iOS apps, whatever. Right? Because you still want to use (and not just "look at") Facebook or WhatsApp or BSky or Drive or CoD:BO6 or... everything. And all that stuff runs in an environment with the same privacy-compromising power (generally much more dangerous, frankly).
I just don't see a situation where "use noscript" doesn't really just mean "use your phone so you don't have to use your browser". I mean, why bother? You're not winning anything.
(Quite frankly most of the people I see in this argument eventually admit this straight up: "no javascript" really means "no Google" to them, and their goal isn't privacy at all except as a proxy thing; it's the destruction of the World Wide Web as a platform in favor of Apple's offerings.)
The other motivation mentioned is performance. But they don’t belabor the whole motivation thing anyway. IMO that’s a good, focusing on showing off the tech seems more productive anyway.
It's not JavaScript that I'm against but the many abuses that websites inflict on users—privacy violations, pages of many tens of megabytes long but which only contain some 10k or so of text, the incredibility slow page load times, etc., etc.
As far as I'm concerned CSS is capable of just about anything I require of a webpage.
It seems a shame that not more users are aware of browsing sans JS with a button to turn it on and off. After experiencing the advantages it's quickly habit-forming. The increase in speed of page loads alone justifies killing JS.
At the same time, I want to emphasize more strongly the flip side that I think you don't at but don't go much I to: I do find that writing less code & using the platform is enormously valuable! Doing less & letting the browser do the thing is a very nice win.
If only they would do it nice and consistently, I would agree. Sadly they don't. On one plattform you get sliders in this color who pop in when the mouse moves there, on another you have fixed size sliders of a different color and style. Impossible to make a coherent style like this.
correct, nearly all dont
At the same time doing the simplest imaginable layout was a headache. I've done it, and it was interesting as in, this is a challenge and I am taking it head on, but it never should've been a challenge. Things have improved exponentially here, but it should've been the idea all along. Not how to cascade rules.
All other criticism, the syntax etc. is nitpicky and not important. As long as it's allowing you to do something useful without much fuss, I am ok with any syntax. But it didn't and it never did. Making a webpage layout should not be a full time job.
And since documents "fit" trees way more often than not; I'd say CSS is a good fit.
There used to be DSSSL and JSS. The former came out if the SGML world, like HTML itself, and it was kind if the obvious solution to adapt it for the web. The latter used JavaScript syntax and was Netscape's favourite, which also made sense, them being JavaScript's inventors.
(A maybe interesting aside to this story is that JavaScript actually predates CSS, at least if we go by the dates each shipped in a browser.)
How dare people use CSS without learning in-depth all 20+ specifications! It's an outrage!
When people have problems using a tool, you should look at the tool rather than blaming the people. People aren't going to change. You don't tell people to be more careful using a bandsaw; you install safety features.
How about we do both? We expect people to be able to use the tools, you know, properly, and make sure the tools are well-designed?
Is strange reaction to:
> ... then have a strong opinion after they were forced to use it for a day.
There is not problem with using something without understanding all complex rules. Point is about forming strong opinion based on superficial knowledge.
People are not humble these days.
CSS has a lot of weirdness but I feel like it's been following the trajectory of Javascript toward becoming decent language. Flexbox and the :has selector, and now nesting, cover a lot of the pain points I've had over the years.
> n-th child variable
See sibiling-index() and sibling-count() https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/sibling-ind...
> Reusable blocks
See @function and @mixin draft spec, https://drafts.csswg.org/css-mixins-1/ and https://css-tricks.com/functions-in-css/
Both are available in chrome already.
I think that if you want to follow WAI-ARIA practices, the aria-selected, tabindex and aria-controls need to be updated via JS when the active tab changes? I'd love to be wrong about that.
Accessibility is often an afterthought. And, sometimes there's an assumption that by working with HTML/CSS directly, accessibility comes built in. Just Something to keep in mind when choosing an approach.
I am aware that people who read the blog might base parts of their websites on my examples, so I definitely want to make sure they're accessible as to not cause a negative ripple effect on the web.
I don't have a background in accessibility, but I try to do the best I can. I try out what I make with various accessibility tools (e.g. keyboard navigation, screenreaders), and also read up on how things should be handled.
For the radio tabs specifically - they are keyboard navigable, work with screenreaders, and follow the tabbing to content practice mentioned in the WAI-ARIA example[0].
[0] https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/tabs/examples/tabs-...
Part of the reason for mentioning the radio-tabs is because I was working on my own implementation for a personal project a few weeks ago. My goal was specifically using the role="tab"/role="tabpanel" pattern, but my read of the guidance left me feeling like I was trapped with using JS to set those. Since it was timeboxed, I bailed out to augmenting it with JS for and moved on.
My hope was maybe somebody on HN with more of a background on accessibility could interject some thoughts here.
Focus management:
Focus scopes and restoring focus requires JavaScript. Complex UI components like combo box, grids, and trees require dynamically adjusting tab index and focus. Combo Box requires managing accessibility tree focus separately from DOM focus. Modals implementing focus scopes and restoring focus scopes requires JavaScript.
Key controls:
The ARIA APG patterns call for differences in tab and arrow key control from what the browser would supply. Patterns that involve list of groups use tab to navigate between groups and arrows to navigate within groups.
Personally, I don't have my access to my normal computer/environment at the moment, so I've just been trying to go by the spec when necessary and hope for the best until I do.
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[0]: https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/#fn:10
you're calling the post un-accessible and telling people to not use it as a source - i'd like to know why you think that, and if there's any way to improve the accessibility
I know like 10-15 different languages, and CSS is by far the hardest to read and understand. It's easier to understand x86 assembly than CSS. CSS is basically pre-tokenized input that drives a renderer, but they sort of went halfway and didn't really make it real tokens or really human-writable.
I'd say that it should take the place of ASN.1 in the RFCs as an example of "what not to do."
There's no use comparing CSS and assembly. It betrays a shallow understanding of CSS. Points to ponder:
- Assembly is superlatively imperative while CSS is the opposite. The difference can be jarring for some. It's commonly felt in day-to-day frontend work that switching to CSS (declarative) from almost anything else (imperative) -- JavaScript, PHP, etc. -- requires a significant mental shift, though it does get easier with experience.
- Lot of the vocabulary and concepts used in CSS come from outside the computing world, namely design and publishing. It's somehow a rarely shared factoid, but it's a hint at how too far away from Kansas we are to be making fair comparisons.
- A pervasive mistake that coders make (and unfortunately a lot of CSS teaching material out there too) is to approach CSS as a set of explicit, atomic instructions -- a fair coder-y assumption, but a bad mental model that leads to frustration. Understand that these instructions can affect one another; some switch entire layout algorithms[0] in a given scope, changing how other instructions behave (predictably).
[0] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorit...
CSS is hard to know, even if you know 15 languages.
I can understand many programming languages and write in a subset of many of their features, but I wouldn't claim to know them. That would require a monumental amount of day to day effort, in my opinion (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth).
To me, the best way to understand CSS is to evaluate it after rendering, and I have been writing it for decades.
I do wish we would start to move further towards a sane set of front-end application (logic) technologies (I don't think the current leader, Typescript NextJS is it)
But I do appreciate that CSS is starting to feel a lot more sane these days.