Hacker News Reader

I’ve been testing out the (experimental) animation-timeline and scroll() functionality and it’s incredible.

It’s great to see new features coming to html/css that reduce or eliminate the need for JavaScript.

The more that can be done with declarative interfaces with the browser assuming the optimization and complexity instead of hand coding in JavaScript, the better.

It is more complex, but the complexity in spec can help keep codebases simpler... a lot of the new complexity takes place of some gnarly JS and CSS hacks. Looking back at my career it's hard to believe we used to build websites entirely in tables for layout.

I think it's like this: Håkon/Bert did aim a bit high with the initial design of CSS. It was harder to understand and internalize than HTML.

This hindered adoption.

Then over the years the overall complexity of the web stack (and its' Javascript-based "derivatives") grew, and suddenly CSS is no longer so complex - in comparison.