Skip to content(if available)orjump to list(if available)

You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome

You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome

27 comments

·August 28, 2025
Visit

socalgal2

This article has lots of nice stuff in it but ... that first example in the tweet at the top,

    cool-thing {
        display: flex;
        &[shadow] {
            box-shadow: 1px 1px #0007;
        }
        @media (width < 480px) {
            flex-direction: column;
        }
    }

    and html like

    <cool-thing shadow>wow</cool-thing>
I pasted it into a file and it doesn't work. I honestly didn't expect it to work. I thought you needed more to get a cool-thing element but in any case, it's not encouraging to see the first example fail. Am I missing some context?

rebane2001

it should work, did you put the css between <style> tags?

also the box-shadow is a box shadow, you might wanna change it to text-shadow if that's what you'd expect from it

keeganpoppen

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.

bee_rider

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.

jauntywundrkind

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.

rebane2001

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

disclaimer: i'm the author of the blogpost

Mars008

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.

exabrial

> some users dont want javascript

correct, nearly all dont

dmd

More than 99.9% of web users have never heard of javascript.

pessimizer

A lot of people haven't heard of pancreatic cancer either. Explain it to them and see if they approve.

edit: IE javascript was probably responsible for at least half a dozen times their system has been ruined, and they know what tracking is.

Quarrelsome

omg that's so much prettier than it used to be. What they've done with it is extremely impressive.

awongh

TIL about baseline widely available.

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.

Uninen

[delayed]

Animats

This should make WYSISYG HTML/CSS editors possible again.

Here's a thought. Build a WYSISYG tool like that. HTML/CSS only. Round trip; that is; it reads its own HTML/CSS and works on that, rather than using some separately stored representation.

If you want to use Javascript with this, it has to be inside a manually edited IFRAME or FRAME. If you have Javascript, it's probably for interacting with a server or doing something graphical. Or, more likely, for ads, tracking, and such. Not for layout.

throwaway81523

The great wheel of karma. All the stuff that made javascript despicable now makes css despicable as well.

wpollock

How can one learn modern CSS and is there an online reference that is up to date?

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7

There are a number of sites that aggregate some things, here is one

https://moderncss.dev/topics/

Recent survey of what people use to learn CSS:

https://2025.stateofcss.com/en-US/resources/

CSS Tricks article on this:

https://css-tricks.com/how-to-keep-up-with-new-css-features/

squeegee_scream

MDN is what you're looking for https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

lemonwaterlime

Modern CSS is indeed great. I'm using modern CSS, htmx, and Haskell to develop apps and am loving it.

frizlab

Same but with Swift instead of Haskell. I’m an iOS/macOS developer, but I have to do a web app currently, and I was pleasantly surprised by how powerful and relatively easy CSS is.

user3939382

Who would have thought UI layout and rich formatting would be the hard problem that destroyed personal computing.

paulddraper

> Yes, the syntax isn’t the prettiest, but is it really that hard?

Explain float: clear?

Does that have anything to do with display: flow-root?

And white-space is not actually whitespace?

And when does vertical-align work vs not?

---

^ That is all CSS (and not particularly edgy CSS, except for flow-root).

So....yes, CSS is really that hard. Unless you use the subset of CSS that you have decided to learn + use. Not unlike C++.

nicoburns

IMO it's more like PHP or JavaScript than C++. With C++ there are lots of different dialects in common use and you kinda have to learn them all to be good at C++. Whereas with PHP/JavaScript/CSS there are still ugly corners, but everyone pretty much agrees which the good bits are and which the ugly bits are, and you can mostly just ignore the old legacy bits.

rebane2001

The sentence you quoted refers to the 'centering a div' example, not CSS as a whole.

whytaka

I haven't used float in at least half a decade. CSS is easy.

JohnFen

I suspect, as with programming languages, some people think in a way that makes it easy for them and others think in a way that makes it hard.

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!

paulddraper

> Unless you use the subset of CSS that you have decided to learn + use. Not unlike C++.