Aspects of Modern HTML/CSS You May Not Be Familiar With

Personally -- and I'm no web dev, so I probably don't count -- I think CSS is hard (maybe more irritating than hard, but in any case I wouldn't call it easy). In large part because the syntax is ugly, but also because it just doesn't "mesh" with me. If I'm reading it or writing it, I always feel like I'm having to decode it. But I can easily and happily work with some programming languages that most devs would cross the street to avoid.

Maybe that's also why some people are attracted to being web devs and others aren't?

As a user, nothing would thrill me more than if web pages just stopped using JS, though, so I am very happy that there is a feasible alternative to doing that that web devs could enjoy!

The only one that comes to mind is is `with`, which is officially discouraged in the spec.

I suppose the other one is type coercion. (Like [] + [] stuff. That's no end of "ha ha JS weird.")

Anything but. It combines whitespace collapsing and text wrapping in one property and makes a mess of both.

See https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#white-space-property to get an idea of how complicated it is.

The MDN article is self-contradictory, e.g. note how the example don't match the "syntax" section.

Plus, it has inconsistent quirks with HTML textarea.

And the fact that yours was the only comment to point this out...

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.

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.)

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)

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.

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.

GUIs are successful when they follow visual and behaviorial standards. With everything that CSS and JS can do, every website becomes an exercise in discovery just to be able to use it for its intended purpose.

I generally avoid vh, and rely more on calc and vw to calculate any height that needs cropping, padding or scaling.

For example dynamically equalising the height of boxes with unequal content - used to be something you did need JavaScript for.

Another is setting widths, heights and gaps using a css grid to create responsive mosaic image layouts.

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.

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.

Nobody came up with a better alternative though (apart from the many dialects that transpile to CSS again).

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.