CSS done grown up
Look at this bit of CSS. For greatest effect, imagine sending it yourself from ten or fifteen years ago, or the first time you hit upon a limitation in browser compatibility or looked at someone else’s stylesheet and wondered “what the heck is going on here and what’s a high-pass filter?”
Marvel at all the things that are just there, no hacks or preprocessors or compilers required. Gradients, animations, input states. CSS has grown into the open-ended, declarative, and compatible system it always wanted to be. I dare say that CSS is (finally?) hitting its mark.
Can Ruby, JS, Python, C#, Java, etc. make a similar claim? Particularly in expanding the capability with, AFAICT, only superficial syntactic changes and adding new rules.
Can you still use Python from ten years ago, add new functionality to a Ruby program with a keyword, or use new features in JavaScript across all runtimes? Were it only true! (Where it’s not, there are usually pretty good reasons, to be fair.)
Based on tinkering with SwiftUI lately: this beats configuring views. Even when I’m building both with the help of Spicy AI Auto-complete. 😉
Previously: low-key CSS libraries.