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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

It’s been nearly 30 years now that we’ve heard this refrain about CSS. Somehow the dream of “just tell the browser to render what I want” still remains elusive.

But maybe it’s just a few dozen more properties and mini-DSLs away this time! Pay no attention to those sirens and false prophets who still believe in anti-CSS “tell the computer how to do exactly what you want” programming…

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Is it easier to build a layout with CSS compared to 20 years ago? Yes. Can we further improve CSS? Yes.

I'm no prophet and CSS, just like any other language has its quirks. And yeah, generally it is my job to try and tell computers what to do so I like powerful tools that let me do what i want :)

You’re missing the irony in the second paragraph. CSS proponents are ideologically opposed to simply telling the computer how to do what you want.

Well, as far as I at least understand it, the argument is that by using JS for this, you are indeed telling the computer what you want, you're just doing it by telling the computer it by telling it exactly how to do it. In contrast, in CSS, you're telling the computer what you want by… telling it what you want, and letting the browser engine worry about the how.

CSS isn't perfect, but it certainly works nicely for declaring layouts most of the time. It's of course alsp easy to get wrong, but doing all of the layout logic manually doesn't seem like a proper solution.

I agree that there should be an "escape hatch" to implement stuff that evaded the great wisdom of the commitees. The Houdini project may become such: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Houdini

But I do also see the benefit of a declarative system for most cases. Adaptive layouts are hard to do with imperative code, and very easily lead to e.g. infinite loops, so it's nice to work with a declarative system that guarantees a stable layout. That said, CSS is far from an ideal such system with so much ad-hoc and legacy baggage.

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