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?”

CSS in 2025 is pretty good!

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.