You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome

Summary

You no longer need JavaScript So much of the web these days is ruined by the bloat that is modern JavaScript frameworks. React apps that take several seconds to load. NextJS sites that throw random hydration errors. The node_modules folder that takes up gigabytes on your hard drive. It’s awful. And you don’t need it. Name Status Type Size Time app200document153.8 kB51 ms 6920616d20612066-s.p.6f6e7421.woff2200font31.5 kB32 ms 686579206d652074-s.p.6f6f2121.woff2200font28.5 kB116 ms 77687920646f6573.css200stylesheet253 kB47 ms 2074686520646566.js200script648 kB83 ms 61756c74206e6578.js200script166 kB363 ms 746a732074616b65.js200script83.3 kB46 ms turbopack-20757020302e354d.js200script38.0 kB95 ms 423f207468617427.js200script414 B34 ms 73206d6f72652074.js200script32.6 kB49 ms 68616e206d792065.js200script15.1 kB71 ms 6e7469726520626c.js200script143 kB48 ms 6f6721 hey there!200script4.1 kB103 ms The intro paragraph of this post is tongue-in-cheek. It’s there to get you to read the rest of the post. I suspect the megabytes of tracking scripts intertwined with bad code is far more likely to be the real culprit behind all the terrible sites out there. Web frameworks have their time and place. And despite my personal distaste for them, I know they are used by many teams to build awesome well-optimized apps. Despite that, I think there’s some beauty in leaving it all behind. Not just the frameworks, but JavaScript altogether. Not every site needs JavaScript. Perhaps your e-commerce site needs it for its complex carts and data visualization dashboards, but is it really a necessity for most of what’s out there? It’s actually pretty incredible what HTML and CSS alone can achieve. So, what do you say? My goal with this article is to share my perspectives on the web, as well as introduce many aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with. I’m not trying to make you give up JavaScript, I’m just trying to show you everything that’s possible, leaving it up to you to pick wha...