[niutech]

Becoming? CSS is already Turing-complete (https://stackoverflow.com/a/5239256), even without if() function.

Why? Because of enormous JS bloat. Pure CSS solutions are more performant and backwards-compatible (don't raise exceptions which abort the code).

Who decides? CSS Working Group.

[runarberg]

I am not a CS expert, but this does not look like a full implementation of rule 110, nor is it even pure CSS (there is HTML involved).

What I see in the SO answer is an interface for Rule 110 with an additional set of instruction (written in a natural language) for the user to execute manually. So you can use CSS + HTML to create an interface for a Rule 110, which is then written in a natural language around that interface. The answer even states that (very relevant) caveat.

> [...] so long as you consider an appropriate accompanying HTML file and user interactions to be part of the “execution” of CSS.

[niutech]

SO comment:

> The formal definition (simplest) of Turing Machine is simply a tuple of states set, symbol set, initial state, accepting states set and a transition function. There is no crank in it. By computation we mean somebody needs to apply the transition function faithfully on the tape which is exactly like the clicking in this case. More formally, a model of computation can be viewed as a set of rules somebody needs to follow to do the computation. In that sense, I think CSS is Turing-Complete.

There is even a "CPU emulation" in pure CSS: https://dev.to/janeori/expert-css-the-cpu-hack-4ddj and pure CSS fetch: https://dev.to/janeori/100-css-fetch-and-exfiltrate-512-bits...

[smsm42]

Or they are performant now. But once people start writing CSS code the same way the write JS code, they stop to be. You can still write super-tight code in ASM (or eve C) and it will be blazing fast. Almost nobody does it, because it's too hard. Once people start writing CSS the same way, it'll become slow and bloated too.

[zarzavat]

The big performance sink in CSS is rule matching, or layout if you consider that to be part of CSS.

Efficient evaluation of expressions is a solved problem.

Having conditionals would actually improve performance because you can use fewer rules.