Is CSS breaking the separations of concerns?

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Hello Reader,

This week, I’m formatting things a little differently because the comments on a YouTube video I posted got me a little riled up 😅.

So, starting with that video, I took a look at Temani Afif’s mind-blowing CSS-only graph theory CodePen.

And while most people were pretty blown away by this as well, there were a fair number of comments about how this is breaking the separation of concerns and how CSS shouldn’t be able to do things like this.

To me, this is more about “this is doing what I’ve traditionally had to use JS for,” rather than “this is what JS should be used for,” and I went off on this idea over on the second channel.

🙋‍♂️ What I've been up to this week

📺 F1 Website Championship

As a life-long F1 fan, and the 2026 season starting next week, I decided to do an F1 website championship, where I pitted the teams against one another with rounds for design, performance, accessibility, and CSS.

The design rankings were my own opinions, but I used Lighthouse for the performance and accessibility scores, and Project Wallace for the CSS score.

Each round is scored using the F1 point system, and while not particularly educational, I had fun putting it together 😅.

⚡Instantly improve your transitions and animations with linear()

A quick look at how we can instantly create better animations and transitions by using linear() timing functions (with the help of Easing Wizard).

🔗 Other awesome stuff from around the web

So in the video at the top people complained about CSS being too much of a programming language with it able to do some graph theory… don’t let them know Rebane made an entire x86 emulator using only CSS 😆.

You can fill out your bracket for the upcoming March MadCSS tournament (of which I am one of the contestants).
Ahmad Shadeed’s CSS Day talk from last year, Smart Layouts, is now on YouTube!
A new CSS game landed on comicss, where you need to figure out the named colors, with a few hints to help.
Firefox has added setHTML, which is essentially a safe version of innerHTML. Nice to see Firefox being the first to ship cool features again.
Chris Coyier with a super quick demo on sibling-index() .
Zoran Jambor explores the text-index keywords including a few that I had no idea about.

🏁

Have a fantastic week!
Kevin

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Hi! I'm Kevin