[noamyoungerm]

I once made a moderately interactive widget using pure CSS, and it was a relatively interesting experience. The widget itself had buttons that let you choose several parameters (about 400 combinations overall) and would render out a 'demo' of our product.

Some stuff I learned: 1. Most of css3 is supported in IE8, so we felt fine with using the widget in production.

2. With any reasonable LESS / SASS syntax, it's easy to generate complex stuff so long as it's limited to a discrete number of states. Stuff like tic-tac-toe are easily doable if you treat them as a state-machine.

3. It's way faster than JS, and there's a good reason for it. CSS can be totally figured out in one round of parsing, and so long as no JS is used to change it, the same parsed state can be used for all of your states. Even though it adds tens of kilobytes to the file size of both CSS and HTML, it's still faster than executing code.

This definitely isn't the right solution for all problems, but I think it's important to think about whether you problem can be solved in pure CSS, and to strongly prefer it for static sites and nearly-static sites.