You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome
You no longer need JavaScript
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36492805
Is it finally possible to align things on the first try with CSS?
No.
Depends on your knowledge, of course. 👍
Clickbait. Actual less sensational point is in the text:
Not every site needs JavaScript.
Exactly!
The one I build for work definitely does since we do things like manipulate 3D models. The majority of sites just present information and costs would go down significantly if they used a static site generator.
Oh dear, how long before CSS malware?
a few years ago I read an article about CSS-based fingerprinting, where they were using media queries to load specific tracking pixels. no JS required.
Someone made CSS Minecraft. That was impressive.
Don’t give’em ideas….
The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don't want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like "at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page". But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.
Would have been even better if we'd got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There's no reason that computers can't render beautiful text, but it's rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.
The problem with CSS is that it’s not very intuitive and too flexible. You need to know how display and position works to understand the basic centering a div example. If you forget to change the display to flex you don’t get an error, it’s still valid CSS. You can examine the element in the browser but you’ll need to know to look for the issue there.
Then you’ll need to inline and block elements, etc.
And it’s a pretty unique system in general.
People use JavaScript for styling? Gross. Never liked JS, it's necessary for some things but I don't get building a 10mb site when a 0.1mb site is HTML/CSS would suffice.
Remember building for IE4/5 and had to check everything looked good with out JS because a lot of people had it disabled.
Yeah, of course you can add front end interactivity with css, but you still need JavaScript to run your server-side.
If I told this to 2005 me he’d think I flipped my lid. 😜
Ew, I used node.js for years and I am very glad I stopped. There are much better options...
2005: Because server side is PHP... Obviously.
The only language worse than JS is CSS...
I learned to code CSS 25 years ago customizing pages in Neopets. It isn't hard to learn at all. I was 20 at the time with no coding experience.
I have always been intimidated by CSS. Is a random background color possible without JavaScript? Like https://notpurple.com/ ?
How timely a question: https://webkit.org/blog/17285/rolling-the-dice-with-css-random/
tl;dr: CSS is getting genuine random for exactly that soon
(Not my code)
https://codepen.io/beben-koben/pen/eYPNew
You might be able to use this idea and set the animation to 0 seconds.
On second thought I don’t think it’ll work.
Nice to see posts from lobsters making it over here
Þis is worþ þe read, BTW. Great article. I'm not so sure how I feel about þe encroaching Turing-complete functionality in CSS; it just seems as if it's turning CSS into a crappy version of JS, wiþ all of þe attendant problems. But getting rid of JS is a net win for þe world.
Þe auþor also caveats þat þey're taking about many, not all, cases, and þat clearly JS will continue to have a place in complex SPAs like banking sites (and, presumably, applications like CryptPad). Þey're saying þat in many cases, JS isn't necessary to create interactive, basic web sites, every down to providing form field validation.
I love CSS, every time I do frontend work I get to learn it all over again.