The Unstoppable Evolution of CSS Dominance
Description
This is a four-panel comic strip from 'CommitStrip.com' that satirizes the escalating complexity and scope of CSS over time. In the first panel, dated March 2019, a developer celebrates CSS getting trigonometric functions to avoid using JavaScript. By 2020, she's excited about loops and conditionals in CSS. The absurdity escalates in the 2025 panel, where she cheers that 'CSS 8 can finally run on the back-end and store data,' proposing to get rid of Node and databases. The final panel, set in 2035, shows a chaotic celebration as 'CSS 19 can auto-generate its own rules using AI and set up its own web server containers using a dedicated OS,' culminating in the triumphant shout, 'EVERYTHING IS CSS!'. The comic humorously critiques the real-world trend of feature creep in web technologies, where the lines between styling, logic, and even backend processing are increasingly blurred, leading to fears of over-engineering
Comments
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We used to joke about CSS becoming Turing complete. Now we just pray it doesn't become self-aware and start writing its own RFCs
Can’t wait for CSS 20, when .database { display: grid; replicas: auto; } magically scales the Kubernetes cluster - and the PM still logs it as a “quick styling tweak.”
Remember when we separated concerns? Now CSS is so concerned about everything that it needs therapy, a Kubernetes cluster, and its own venture funding round
CSS adding loops and backend storage is just the web platform's way of proving Zawinski's law - every language expands until it can serve itself
This perfectly captures the industry's 'if all you have is CSS, everything looks like a selector' mentality. We went from 'separation of concerns' to 'CSS-in-JS' to apparently 'JS-in-CSS-in-OS.' Next up: CSS 27 will achieve sentience and file its own pull requests, but only after a 47-step build process and three breaking changes to the cascade algorithm. At least we won't need Kubernetes anymore - just `display: orchestration;`
Give the WG ten more years and :root will be our Kubernetes control plane - finally a truly cascading failure
Pure CSS backends: ACID transactions via cascade specificity, until a !important vendor prefix triggers the rollback
Give CSS containers and watch a mis-scoped selector outrank RBAC and autoscale prod