January 29, 2026
Cascades, clapbacks, chaos
The Origin of Cascades - on the History of CSS (2020)
25 Years of CSS: nostalgia, rage, and memes from the style wars
TLDR: CSS turns 25 with a history talk praising its simple, adaptable ‘cascade.’ Comments erupt: purists defend classic CSS, utility-first fans and styles glued into app code push modern hacks, while everyone memes about browser bugs, specificity fights, and the life-saving magic—and curse—of !important.
Happy 25th, CSS — the web’s outfit designer! In a Darwin-themed talk, the creators and early adopters retrace how the “cascade” (rules stacking in order), “specificity” (which rule wins), and a zillion units made CSS flexible enough to style everything. The message: simplicity and adaptation kept it alive, and a video strolls through the eras with browser fossils.
Comments section? Absolute circus. “Team Cascade” veterans swooned over the history lesson and swore the old ways still work if you name things well and resist panic. Across the aisle, “Team Utility” waved their Tailwind classes and said modern apps forced a survival makeover—CSS didn’t scale, so the ecosystem did. JavaScript-in-CSS fans chimed in: if styles live next to components, on-call engineers sleep at night.
Memes detonated everywhere: people confessing “specificity wars,” flashbacks to Internet Explorer bugs, and the ritual summoning of !important “like hot sauce.” One top joke: “I survived the Float Age, ask me anything.” Another: “Darwinism in web design means only the divs survive.” Even amid snark, many thanked the talk for reminding them CSS is a language, not a punchline—just maybe keep Flexbox on speed dial. History class, meet flame war. And yes, someone blamed margins for everything again.
Key Points
- •CSS has been in use for about 25 years since its initial proposal to style the web.
- •The language evolved through platform changes in the late 1990s and beyond.
- •Key features like cascade and specificity contributed to CSS’s success.
- •CSS’s broad set of values and units provides flexibility for style definitions.
- •Developers adapted CSS usage patterns, selectively applying features to meet project needs.