Jenn Schiffer wrote a blog post a couple months ago entitled A Call For Web Developers To Deprecate Their CSS. When I first read this article, I was frustrated and confused. I asked myself questions like… How can it be so simple? Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? How much time of my life have I wasted writing extra spaces and curley braces in CSS?!?

In a word, I was depressed.

I loved the idea of doing styles in JavaScript and dropping CSS altogether. It was a big change that could dramatically change my workflow. Then I started thinking about JavaScript too. How much of my life had I spent writing JS late into the late under the dim light of my computer monitor trying to do animations and hover effects? Probably hours.

JavaScript is cool and fun to play with. And jQuery has made things like rich web animations way easier to do. But then I got to thinking… do we really need JavaScript? Think about it. People claim that client-side MVC apps are becoming powerful, but we all know that they’re not that performant in production. When it comes down to it…

Developers use JavaScript for 2 things — animation and (now) styles.

What if we could not only drop CSS? But also JS? An HTML-only world sounds like a dream to me.

Blink & Marquee

Back in the day, the only animation developers needed was provided by HTML’s blink and marquee tags. That’s all we had because that’s all you’ll ever need to do. Marquees for movement; blink tags for blinking. If you think about complex animations, their basically just compositions of these two behaviors.

So I’ve been busy. I’ve been writing to all the W3Schools members I know and begging them to add blink and marquee back into our browsers. We need these animations, and once we have them once again, we can drop JS altogether.

Prebuttal

I know that they’ll be a few nay-sayers out there who question an HTML-only approach to animation. “What if I want to change the basic behavior?” Blink and marquee tags already provide that. For example, with a marquee tag you can specify behavior, direction, and loop. If you’re not smart enough to make any animation with these 2 tags and the vast set of options they offer, you’re not meant to be a web developer. You might as well pack up your suitcase and go back to Wisconsin.

HTML did styles first

As far as styles, go, we know HTML is good at that. They did it first. Take a look at this.

<p bgcolor="black" hspace="10">
  <font face="verdana" color="red">Hello World!</font>
</p>

And yes if you really want to use newer, fancy styles:

<p style="border-radius: 6px;overflow:hidden;">Hi</p>

I actually prefer inline-styles. No need to go back and forth between 2 files, trying to match up what styles are being applied where. They’re inline.

Do Your Part

If a world of HTML-only web developer sounds awesome to you, write to any W3Schools members you can get ahold of and tell them we must have full blink and marquee support in our browsers once more. Let’s get rid of JS once and for all and CSS too! Who needs ’em? HTML was my first love and I’m going back to her.