[lemonwaterlime]

The challenge for most people is that HTML and Modern CSS are a declarative programming paradigm. You then selectively sprinkle state on top of that.

I use HTML and Modern CSS for frontend. I sprinkle htmx when I want interactivity and a tiny amount of plain JavaScript. That gives me a mostly declarative frontend.

On the backend I use Haskell, which is also declarative unless you opt into other things.

The challenge with web development is that we’ve learned over the years that asynchronous, stateful programming is the most bug-prone programming yet we reach for it first. We should reach for those things last and where they are appropriate.

The thing about cascading style sheets is that it all cascades by default. A web page naturally resizes. It’s when we add all this other stuff that things start breaking and becoming rigid. The key to CSS is knowing when to let go.