I'm constantly amazed by how much can be achieved with only CSS nowadays. It seems like it's getting more powerful by the month as developers find new and tricky ways to push the boundary ;)
Flexbox & grid took a lot of wind out of the sails of the various frameworks.
The #1 (by a long shot) reason I used to reach for things like Bootstrap was to get my divs in the right spots on the viewport. Now, I can specify sophisticated 2d layouts based upon media queries that consider a combination of viewport dimensions and other device capabilities. Not a single line of javascript is required to do this.
Yep, I had a huge library of SASS (SCSS) mixins that I’d use to accomplish a lot back in the day. ThoughtBot had (has?) a library called Bourbon that came with a bunch and they were amazing.
> I'm constantly amazed by how much can be achieved with only CSS nowadays.
Honestly it's a bit too much. CSS is used for fingerprinting and exploits. It's become a security risk to have it enabled and I think before long we'll want CSS blockers the same way we have blockers for JS. The ability to allow only sane subset of CSS would be really useful!
Modern responsive design can do away with almost 100% of media queries. I used one single media query for one element after spending several days trying to write formulas to handle a weird edge case. I dislike media queries.
You might be pretty disappointed by the defaults in many cases: it’s extremely common to start with styles for the smallest viewports (“mobile”) and use media queries to add larger viewport variants. I don’t know if you’re among the same people who complain about the overuse of mobile UI techniques on larger screens/devices, but that’s almost certainly what you’d get more of in general.
That's a good point. At the same time, I believe it can make a lot of sense, particularly if it is used to implement functionality that was previously implemented in JavaScript.
Given that CSS is not an actual programming language, browser vendors can optimize it in ways that JavaScript can't. This extra optimization is a big benefit in the world of mobile devices and batteries.
I would maybe say that it is almost assuredly one of the most featureful and widely used layout technology. But I'm not convinced it's the most powerful, flexible, or even advanced. It suffers from significant performance issues due to legacy baggage and a poor underlying abstractions. There is a reason anyone building things like visual editors, spreadsheets, et al tend to drop into lower level rendering technologies.
This is probably coming to CSS in the coming years. [0] Which makes me very excited for one reason: CSS is nearing feature parity (and surpassing it in some areas) with Adobe InDesign, so we can finally ditch adobe and just make print publications within the browser. The only other thing missing after custom colour profiles is a proper text justification algorithm, although, for many, it's not so important because people are already used to reading ragged text.
The #1 (by a long shot) reason I used to reach for things like Bootstrap was to get my divs in the right spots on the viewport. Now, I can specify sophisticated 2d layouts based upon media queries that consider a combination of viewport dimensions and other device capabilities. Not a single line of javascript is required to do this.