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   Eric A. Meyer (meyerweb@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 14-Feb-2026 19:59:13 JST Eric A. Meyer

   I saw yet another “CSS is a massively bloated mess” whine and I’m like. My dude. My brother in Chromium. It is trying as hard as it can to express the totality of visual presentation and layout design and typography and animation and digital interactivity and a few other things in a human-readable text format. It’s not bloated, it’s fantastically ambitious. Its reach is greater than most of us can hope to grasp. Put some *respect* on its *name*.

   • Embed this notice
     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 01:33:28 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Nick Dumas

     @nickdumas @Meyerweb that’s not an excuse to make easy cases easy

   • Embed this notice
     Nick Dumas (nickdumas@fosstodon.org)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 01:33:31 JST Nick Dumas

     in reply to

     @Meyerweb I call this "irreducible complexity". Some problems/tasks are just HARD and there's nothing anyone can do to actually get rid of it.

     You can HIDE the complexity, Markdown is a great example of this. You're still designing a document and its layout, but it hides a lot of the knobs.

     It's great, until you suddenly actually need pixel precise element positioning, and then you have to mix HTML and markdown and the complexity reveals itself

   • Embed this notice
     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 02:12:20 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Nick Dumas

     @nickdumas @Meyerweb you said it like “because Markdown can’t do it all, there’s no point of having Markdown at all”. But there absolutely is the point. Even if it can’t do it all, but can make easy things easy.

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     Nick Dumas (nickdumas@fosstodon.org)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 02:12:21 JST Nick Dumas

     in reply to

     • Niki Tonsky

     @nikitonsky @Meyerweb I'm not sure I follow.

   • Embed this notice
     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 11:39:00 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Nick Dumas

     @nickdumas @Meyerweb right, sorry, my bad. I read that wrong and was arguing with voices in my head

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     Nick Dumas (nickdumas@fosstodon.org)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 11:39:01 JST Nick Dumas

     in reply to

     • Niki Tonsky

     @nikitonsky @Meyerweb I never said Markdown was useless. I'm a HUGE fan, 98% of what I write is markdown.

     All I said is that when your use case goes beyond the limited complexity that Markdown accounts for, there's an explosive revelation of the underlying irreducible complexity of typesetting.