> I feel like it all started to go downhill, fast, with the background gradient syntax

I'll take background in CSS over tiled 1px-wide gradient background images any day. The responsibilities being piled to CSS keep increasing, but I believe it is being done in good faith to at improve/formalize what people in the wild are already doing with hacks. Remember DHTML?

Oh I do, I do... and I agree that many of the things CSS does for you today are vastly better than the ad-hoc solutions we had in the past (if you ever have to create an HTML email - and thankfully I am able to outsource all of that sort of work to someone who actually takes a perverse pleasure in it - that's always a nice reminder of how silly HTML and CSS were in the late '90s before CSS was actually broadly usable).

But still... some of the syntax we have now, not to mention the sheer breadth of verbiage, is insane. CSS feels like it's been groaning under the weight of all of this guff for quite some time now, and adding new obscure units and funny things in square brackets isn't really going to improve matters.

> But still... some of the syntax we have now, not to mention the sheer breadth of verbiage, is insane

I had somehow missed that your gripe is with the syntax - I fully agree with you on that! CSS definitely feels kludgey, especially for larger/complex apps or sites. I now think of real CSS as a target that my build system generates as I mostly write in Sass or LESS. I find those superior to vanilla CSS in maintainability and composability.

I couldn't go back to vanilla CSS. Even with just its basic nesting features, SCSS enables a much more modular, compartmentalized, and parsable format, with a clear view of the overall hierarchy via imports

Dude! I had so forgot about making those 1px by however long/high images, over and over as size of things changed.

CSS/HTML is a complicated mess. But anyone who thinks it used to be better needs to take off the rose tint glasses.

Remember back in the days you had to use rounded corners images and JS hacks to get a result that border-radius does today. Nightmares.

The ironic thing is now instead of having to load 40 images, you're loading 40 different JS libraries to get the job done.

I'm still not sure if we're better off yet. . . .

I know what you mean, but just to be clear, 0 libraries are needed for me to write CSS.

I've always seen it referred to as "fractional". Have you seen it described as something else?

Well, @fantasai, who should probably know, says "I think we never really decided on that": https://twitter.com/DasSurma/status/815910270023430144