Theoleff

Agreed. I think part of why it's hard to convey is that a lot of people formed their idea of CSS back when flexbox was new. These days an accordion is a few <details>, and a reading progress bar is a fixed div with animation-timeline: scroll(). You don't need JS for either.

(Full disclosure, I wrote a book on this, so I'm not exactly neutral: https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/)

Less than you'd think. A lot of it is just knowing the right element exists. A slide-out menu that closes on Esc or when you click outside is a button with popovertarget, a nav with popover, and a few lines of CSS for the animation.

(I'm biased, I ended up writing a book about this kind of stuff: https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/)

Here's my blog https://theosoti.com/ where I share mainly about CSS. They are a mix of long articles and some short ones to talk about stuff I'm currently learning.

Happy New Year everyone. 2025 was a big year for me.

I spent a lot of time writing and sharing technical content, mostly about modern CSS. I didn’t expect much from it at first, but it slowly compounded.

Over the past year:

- On LinkedIn[0], my posts reached ~10M impressions and ~15k people decided to follow along.

- 1,800+ joined my newsletter.

- My blog[1] went from ~1–2 Google clicks/day to ~40/day.

- I published a book[2] about building UI with less JavaScript (185 copies sold so far).

What surprised me most wasn’t the numbers, but how much people care about clear, practical explanations and simple tools.

May 2026 be even better :)

[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theosoti/ [1]: https://theosoti.com/ [2]: https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/

Thank you, it means a lot!

I originally started writing it because I was tired of books becoming obsolete every two years while the underlying problems stayed the same.

Thanks for sharing that! It’s a super common story. Frontend patterns moved fast (especially for the last 3 years), and not always in a way that encouraged checking what the browser itself could already do.

If you want to improve a bit and discover more what CSS and HTML can do today, I also try to post daily on my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theosoti/

Yup, at this point it feels more like habit than necessity. People learned to build things like dropdowns in JavaScript years ago, so they keep doing it that way.

A lot of devs simply don’t look any further when it comes to what HTML and CSS already provide.

The interesting part here isn’t “no JavaScript”, it’s that HTML already covers more use cases than people remember (forms, dialogs, validation, navigation).

I ran into this repeatedly while writing my book "You Don’t Need JavaScript"[0]: most JS in these cases isn’t adding capability, it’s compensating for forgotten platform features.

[0] https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/

I wrote a book about modern HTML & CSS to create website with as little javascript as possible. I made almost 5k$ the first month, now I do 300-500$/month with it. Here’s the link: https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/

Hi HN,

Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring how far modern CSS can go on its own. The result is an ebook called "You Don’t Need JavaScript".

It’s a collection of UI components (animations, modals, dark mode, etc.) built entirely with CSS, along with explanations of the techniques and philosophy behind them. The main idea: use the simplest tool that gets the job done, without sacrificing accessibility or creativity.

I’d love feedback, whether on the concept, the techniques, or even the way it’s presented.

Good to know, thank you!

Thanks for the link, not sure why it's not clickable in my post.

Hi everyone,

I’m thrilled to share my new blog post on my frontend development blog!

This time, I’ve taken a deep dive into scroll-driven animations in CSS which are way better than JS animations. The blog continues to focus on making learning CSS fun and interactive, with hands-on examples you can play with directly in your browser.

Your feedback on this post would mean the world to me and will help shape the direction of future content.

Thank you for your support