The evolution of how we use CSS

Short summary

A historical overview of CSS from its origins through the preprocessor and utility-framework eras. The article argues CSS was never badly designed but simply incomplete, which drove the community to build abstractions like Sass and CSS-in-JS. As the platform caught up—adding custom properties, nesting, and more—many of those workarounds became less necessary.

• •CSS survived 30 years by staying focused on its core purpose as a declarative styling language
• •Preprocessors like Sass filled gaps the platform hadn't yet covered, not flaws in CSS itself
• •Native CSS features like custom properties are now replacing build-time abstractions

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.