Is it finally possible to align things on the first try with CSS?

Clickbait. Actual less sensational point is in the text:

Not every site needs JavaScript.

The problem with CSS is that it’s not very intuitive and too flexible. You need to know how display and position works to understand the basic centering a div example. If you forget to change the display to flex you don’t get an error, it’s still valid CSS. You can examine the element in the browser but you’ll need to know to look for the issue there.

Then you’ll need to inline and block elements, etc.

And it’s a pretty unique system in general.

The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don’t want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like “at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page”. But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.

Would have been even better if we’d got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There’s no reason that computers can’t render beautiful text, but it’s rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.

Yeah, of course you can add front end interactivity with css, but you still need JavaScript to run your server-side.

If I told this to 2005 me he’d think I flipped my lid. 😜

The only language worse than JS is CSS…

I have always been intimidated by CSS. Is a random background color possible without JavaScript? Like https://notpurple.com/ ?

Nice to see posts from lobsters making it over here

I learned to code CSS 25 years ago customizing pages in Neopets. It isn’t hard to learn at all. I was 20 at the time with no coding experience.