Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

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There's definitely some cool stuff here for sure, and I'm happy to see it getting better support.

CSS Nesting is a huge deal for example, since it's one of those features that kinda made SASS and LESS useful to begin with, and (like variables) was always better as a core CSS feature than a preprocessor one. Always super interested in seeing what can be done with custom properties too, since that feels like a lovely next step after things like Shadow DOM and custom elements.

And popover is surprisingly neat too. The fact you can do these popup modals and things without any JavaScript now is super useful, and something that should finally stop developers wasting time with custom modals, dropdown menus, hamburger buttons, etc.

But I do wish that forms got a bit more attention from projects like this. The current status of them (wildly inconsistent in different browsers for many HTML 5 era fields, reliant on proprietary pseudoclasses being styled for display purposes, things being difficult to customise in general) feels surprisingly archaic for a platform that can let you do seemingly anything.

UI designers that are allowed to roam free will often NOT want these new default modals, menus, buttons, etc. even if it was their jam pre-default. This will help, but consistency seems to be seen as a weakness in UI rather than a feature we should all strive for.

Consistency of style in the general sense is what designers wish to avoid. Consistency of browser behaviour and default style, on the other hand, is the grail from which creativity can flourish unbounded on the web.

If you’d read the article, you’d have read that the new popover element allows CUSTOM elements, like designers love. Just without JS.

Again, my point is that there will be requests for features that will still be beyond these new features such as needing Javascript. And again, these are great and useful advancements.

For example, the `@starting-style` allows for a starting value, but if the UI requires that it's conditional, then that's likely JS. It's toward the end of the article. You may not have gotten to it.

CSS nesting is the last reason I use a CSS preprocessor.*

Once Safari 17.2+ gains more traction, I can use straight CSS :)

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*That, and variables for @media query. But that's a less common need.

Safari has supported CSS nesting since 16.5. The only thing added in 17.2 is the ability to omit the & in some cases, which was a more recent change to the specification.

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