The first S in CSS stands for “style.” Think colors and fonts, borders and shadows, rows and columns, animations and transitions. CSS is the programming language that makes a website look pretty (or pretty ugly, often). It’s what makes this very webpage look like itself—look WIRED.
\n\nOne paragraph in, a certain reader will already be smarting at my description of CSS. “It’s a style sheet language,” I can hear them say, “not a programming language.” (The second S indeed stands for “sheets,” and the C, if anyone cares, for “cascading.”) Or, “it’s a domain-specific language, not a general-purpose language.” Also, “it doesn’t execute” and, of course, “it’s not Turing complete” (although … ). Granted, CSS is a little different. There’s no compile step, and it doesn’t throw errors at run time like other languages. But that’s all beside the point.
\n\nThe gatekeeping over whether CSS is a “real” programming language exists partly because it’s so simple to start—anyone can grok “background: red” right away. But simple does not mean easy, as the programmer-writer Jeremy Keith observed, and calling CSS easy or unserious should be tired by now. There were about 50 properties in the initial CSS specification in 1996 (like…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/