This is absolutely horrible... in a good way. Kinda like Doom in a PDF. Well done.
Only Chrome ..
Incredible achievement. Horrible development on CSS front.
CSS should NOT be becoming turing complete. Nor any other DSL.
> A hover-based clock, such as the one in Jane Ori's CPU Hack, is fast and stable, but requires you to hold your mouse on the screen, which some people claim does not count as turing complete for whatever reason, so I wanted this demo to be fully functional with zero user input.
That hover clock post is from 2023 and the "some people claim does not count" post is 2022. They were probably talking about the ones that make you check thousands of boxes to drive the logic forward.
Anyway, very cool advancement.
I think we can look forward to running this on more non-Chrome browsers once @function [0] gets wider support?
It relies on a few things, but @functions, if() statements, and container style queries are the main ones.
There is absolutely no reason for css to be turing complete. None. That being said, well done
Can an argument be bade that CSS only exists becuase javascript failed to develop a styling component to displace it?
I like to think webassembly is the right track. But ECMAScript and CSS alike need(ed) to devolve into a simpler byte-code like intermediary language syntax.
Browsers supporting complex languages has always been a bad idea, what they need to support is capabilities, and access and security primitives. wasm hasn't displaced javascript, because afaik, the wasm spec for browsers doesn't require them to implement javascript (and ideally, CSS) via wasm.
Instead of distilling, simplifying and speccing CSS and Javascript, browsers caked on layers upon layers of complicated features. The idea that browsers should define and regulate the languages developers use to write front-end code needs to die.
The complex parts of JavaScript are the semantics, not the syntax. You could reasonably easily spec a bytecode for JS to get rid of the syntax part, but nothing would change in the complexity (almost all modern engines parse to bytecode as the first step and operate on bytecode from then on).
If you wanted to implement JS in wasm, you'd either need a bunch of wasm extensions for JS semantics (dynamic object shape, prototypal inheritance, etc), or you'd need to implement them in wasm from scratch and basically ship a JS runtime written in wasm. Either that, or you need to change the language, which means de facto adding a new language since the old JS still has to stick around for old pages.
> CSS only exists becuase javascript failed to develop a styling component to displace it
there is no sortage of projects that do it (especially during the react era, people wanted to get rid of both html and css) but they get pushed down by dogma/inertia mostly. There was iOS constraint layout language ported to js. Seemed pretty cool, but the guy behind it decided to give up and everyone was like welp we tried, didn't work.
This feels like... just because you can, doesnt mean you should.
Whoa!
Completely unrelated but somehow unsurprising:
Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47062748 - February 2026 (233 comments)
I do actually have a CSS CVE[0] in Chrome, but it was in the changelog as "in Animation" instead of "in CSS", so no fun stories/headlines for me :c
[0] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2025/06/stable-channel...
I don't think it's that unrelated. If you make a system way more complex than it should be (clearly the case with CSS) it's obvious the risk of vulnerabilities increases exponentially.
this is incredible
Abomination! (Makes sign of cross)
Also: wow.
> Your browser is unable to run this demo. Please try with an up-to-date Chromium-based browser.
Sorry to see internet regressing to Internet Explorer days.
Edited to add: This is the message I get when using Firefox.
For what it's worth Firefox has a bug open to implement some of the core CSS features being used here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1950366
Not really, Internet Explorer was single platform and closed source.
Internet Explorer was certainly closed source, but it ran on many platforms.
It was popular on Mac Os (classic and X). It was also released for Solaris and HP-UX.
I'd argue that it's the non-Chrome browsers holding the web back nowadays. Realistically, Firefox and Safari exist to just hold back web standards and eventually implement features Chrome had yesterday.
Nice bait.
Go look at any web proposal. The Mozilla team consistently rejects proposals then relies on WebKit to piggyback on their decision.
This is what I mean by holding the web back. Don't even get me started with WebGPU still not being stabilized in Firefox, or the myriad of features WebKit has not implemented yet with respect to PWAs and service workers.
Really, the situation is more like "Chrome vs two modern IE6s"
I realy hope an AI did this intead of human, such a waste of time (the css part, not the x86)