We could have datasource-backed tables and list elements. Built-in. Sorting for most purposes, "for free", and more with simple and light JS hooks for sort functions. Frames that actually work as useful UI elements. "Basic auth" screens that look and function well enough for lots of purposes. Something like "Apple Pay" or other external payment systems but built into the browser, replacing stupid amounts of time spent writing yet another payment form (and usually fucking it up in several ways)

But no.

> I'm so tired of having to write my own JavaScript to get annoying flashy text

Fret no more:

    <style>

        .blink { animation: blink 1s steps(2, start) infinite; }

        @keyframes blink { 50% { visibility: hidden; } }

    </style>

    <p class="blink">Lorem ipsum</p>

https://jsfiddle.net/xrkLt2nz/

This is certainly better than nothing, but it should just be a tag! I shouldn't need this fancy new-fangled "CSS" fad to bail me out of the problems that W3C created by removing it in the first place!

Definitely. Much less the many several users who yet lack CSS support in their preferred browser.

The good news is that <marquee> still works in the latest Firefox. No need for any new-fangled animation libraries for me.

If front-end devs would stop reinventing things using JS that can be done in CSS, I'd be so happy.

Why?

Not the GP, but my two cents: because JS sucks and CSS can already do it.

Because the JS version will likely take more resources and probably end up being done wrong anyways.

I just don't get why front-end devs feel the need to reinvent everything.

I mean, for fuck's sake, front-end devs for some reason have a fascination with reinventing fucking SCROLLING. And 100% of the time, it either doesn't work, has less functionality than what was built-in, or is annoying for the simple fact that it changes an expected behavior.

If I click my scroll wheel once, and the page keeps scrolling and the scrolling slowly comes to a stop as if it had momentum, that's a bug, not a feature. Stop wasting time deliberately writing bugs.

Scrolling is sort of a strawman here, so I’ll focus on blinking and css features and the need to reinvent these.

First, not all css features are consistent enough from the side you usually tend to approach things, due to various backgrounds and thinking modes. Css is notoriously overcomplicated, nuanced and ad-hoc applicable, and tendency to neglect it is its own self-imposed problem.

Second, there’s no law that dictated some true way to do things. People use instruments they know, and if these work, there’s no need to go and find true ways.

Overall, there’s no difference if you do something in js that css can do, apart from hurting someone’s feelings. All the difference you see is in multi-megabyte tracking scripts, not in js-dom chain per se. The difference betwen css and js ways is barely measurable when you start actually testing it. But js is more powerful in expression and familiar to a developer (except for 60fps+ animations and such).

I say this as a non-frontend dev who makes dashboards and other report/control pages for myself, so opinions may vary. But I’ve never seen a higher resource consumption from avoiding css. To my understanding, literally all sites I ever visited can be implemented in a straightforward way in js and will never “take more resources” and will work as fast as just html. Because it’s literally how any non-C GUI app works on desktops. An interpreted jit-able language controlling some widgets. It’s nothing new or unusual or bizarre. In fact, css is also a language, even if declarative, and keyframes structures and other calc()s also get interpreted many times per second, even if not using a full-blown vm.

In my opinion, people’s web bloat ideas are all over the place and miss the basics comletely, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42990724 , and tend to blame wrong parts.

> Scrolling is sort of a strawman here

Fair enough.

And good points all around, especially in your linked comment.