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Impressive. What I see is that CSS is slowly becoming more and more of a programming/Turing complete and/or graphics language, rather than simply just styleshe

Impressive. What I see is that CSS is slowly becoming more and more of a programming/Turing complete and/or graphics language, rather than simply just stylesheets.

jrumbut 7y ago
Becoming a programming language and enabling awesome creative, aesthetic, and cultural expressions. Both processes feeding off each other. HTML, CSS, SVG, etc. are wonderful things that I hope we perpetuate.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  They also allow more nefarious aspects such as advertising, and the power of the content creator to demand how the viewer sees their content. With older protocols such as IRC, Usenet, email it is the viewer who's in control. If we're talking artwork, I do get it. But most websites are not work of art. They're business, mainly.
- cotelletta 7y ago
  The article is basically a long exercise in avoiding repetition of the source content. For no good reason other than code aesthetics. The webkit reflect operation can be decomposed into a CSS transform and repetition. If there was some sort of template expansion, you could avoid the repetition entirely. But people have a hard on for doing it this way instead, even though it just means adding more special case operators to CSS, instead of designing a proper layout and styling system based on orthogonality. Wonderful is not the word I'd use.
gwern 7y ago
It already lets you encode a CA but you have to have something to drive transitions like a mouse click, apparently. This one makes me wonder if you could encode a Wang tile or another unidirectional CA into reflections+conditionals and get a true TM in CSS...
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > you have to have something to drive transitions like a mouse click, apparently Could you just position the mouse somewhere, never move it again, and let CSS flicker drive everything? It gives you a natural clock.
  - gwern 7y ago
    What's 'CSS flicker'?
    - sbierwagen 7y ago
      CSS can move or change the size of an element. You can also write CSS rules that fire when a mouse hovers over an element. You could write a page so that an element grows until it hits the mouse cursor, shrinks until it's not under the cursor again, then starts growing again... The element boundary will jitter under the cursor, with a frequency determined by animation speed. Worked example: https://dev.to/linxea/css-flicker-on-hover-5gj5 https://dev.to/linxea/css-flicker-on-hover-5gj5

Impressive. What I see is that CSS is slowly becoming more and more of a programming/Turing complete and/or graphics language, rather than simply just stylesheets.

jrumbut 7y ago

Becoming a programming language and enabling awesome creative, aesthetic, and cultural expressions. Both processes feeding off each other. HTML, CSS, SVG, etc. are wonderful things that I hope we perpetuate.

Fnoord 7y ago
They also allow more nefarious aspects such as advertising, and the power of the content creator to demand how the viewer sees their content. With older protocols such as IRC, Usenet, email it is the viewer who's in control. If we're talking artwork, I do get it. But most websites are not work of art. They're business, mainly.
cotelletta 7y ago
The article is basically a long exercise in avoiding repetition of the source content. For no good reason other than code aesthetics. The webkit reflect operation can be decomposed into a CSS transform and repetition. If there was some sort of template expansion, you could avoid the repetition entirely. But people have a hard on for doing it this way instead, even though it just means adding more special case operators to CSS, instead of designing a proper layout and styling system based on orthogonality. Wonderful is not the word I'd use.

gwern 7y ago

It already lets you encode a CA but you have to have something to drive transitions like a mouse click, apparently. This one makes me wonder if you could encode a Wang tile or another unidirectional CA into reflections+conditionals and get a true TM in CSS...

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> you have to have something to drive transitions like a mouse click, apparently Could you just position the mouse somewhere, never move it again, and let CSS flicker drive everything? It gives you a natural clock.
- gwern 7y ago
  What's 'CSS flicker'?
  - sbierwagen 7y ago
    CSS can move or change the size of an element. You can also write CSS rules that fire when a mouse hovers over an element. You could write a page so that an element grows until it hits the mouse cursor, shrinks until it's not under the cursor again, then starts growing again... The element boundary will jitter under the cursor, with a frequency determined by animation speed. Worked example: https://dev.to/linxea/css-flicker-on-hover-5gj5 https://dev.to/linxea/css-flicker-on-hover-5gj5