CSS is DOOMed

https://nielsleenheer.com/articles/2026/css-is-doomed-rendering-doom-in-3d-with-css/

by msephton • 4 months ago

506 109 4 months ago

Levitating5• 4 months ago

Is CSS that awesome? It's still a language designed for styling webpages with 30 year of added features. I'd argue something purpose built would be a much better tool for the potential usecases people try to use CSS for now.

I guess I am asking, if modern CSS is so awesome, it's awesome compared to what exactly?

oopsiremembered2• 4 months ago

I think the argument lies in its flexibility and versatility (regardless of it being the most efficient or effective tool for this one particular task).

Duct tape is awesome for the same reason -- even though there are several effective use cases for duct tape where a different tool would technically be "better" for the job.

Levitating5• 4 months ago

But you don't choose CSS, it's the only tool in the toolbox. As long as you stick to the Web.

sbarre• 4 months ago

What kind of system would you propose (or do you envision) for applying visual styling to HTML markup in modern web pages today?

You can keep it high level but your comment makes me think you have something in mind, and I'm honestly curious.

Levitating5• 4 months ago

I am not sure what a purpose-built tool would look like, but the CSS-like language you see in UI frameworks like GTK is tailored for styling actual UI's.

In CSS on the web, just centering a div has historically been a problem. We have flexbox now, but what if CSS was designed with our current needs from the get-go?

micromacrofoot• 4 months ago

compared to old css, it just keeps getting better

pier25• 4 months ago

I was writing CSS +20 years ago and it's never been better.

hexasquid• 4 months ago

I'm asking the same question!

No doubt the very loudly opinionated not-web-dev community, who have So Much To Say about web devs and web tech, have produced an uncontroversial, perfect layout system, styling system, and language to produce the replacement for this awful web tech. Where is it? What is it? Please provide (the better version of) a hyperlink to the docs.

Levitating5• 4 months ago

There's decades of UI frameworks where the structure of the elements/widgets dictates the layout. HTML/CSS doesn't do that, because it is clearly made to style text documents, not UIs.

So yes I will argue that Qt6 and GTK are better than flexboxes.

Because you asked for it, here's some documentation to a UI framework which I believe to work better than the web stack: https://doc.qt.io/qtforpython-6/PySide6/QtWidgets/index.html

0x737368• 4 months ago

With how these things are going, soon hackers will be challenging themselves to run Crysis on calculators and microwaves

oopsiremembered2• 4 months ago

I think we're going to get to the point where AI will try to run Doom on humans.

OrangePilled2• 4 months ago

This page could use some "Practical CSS scroll snapping": https://css-tricks.com/practical-css-scroll-snapping/

division_by_03• 4 months ago

I was amazed when I first came across CSS scroll snapping. It's great for creating immersive experiences where one part of the page fills the entire screen while native browser scrolling still works.

OrangePilled2• 4 months ago

When done right, I oddly find it immersive too. But know some people aren't fond of scrolling being tampered with.

The post here could really use it though. The main content is pushed to the bottom of the page!

ogghostjelly• 4 months ago

Personally, I find it to be a little disorienting. I get a bit of motion sickness with scroll snapping and I'm not exactly sure why.

larnon• 4 months ago

The live demo doesn't work in Brave.

division_by_03• 4 months ago

The demo really does not work in Brave. I use vertical scroll snapping on the landing page of one of my projects (enabled for screens with a min width of 768px and a min height of 600px - should work in Brave): https://cybernetic.dev

sheept• 4 months ago

Creating 3D scenes with CSS has always been possible[0], but like this project, it's required JavaScript for interactivity.

But there's a lot more CSS features now. While in the past, Turing completeness in CSS required humans to click on checkboxes, now CSS can emulate an entire CPU without JavaScript or requiring user interaction.[1] So I wonder if DOOM could be purely CSS too, in real time.

[0] https://keithclark.co.uk/labs/css-fps/ [1]: https://lyra.horse/x86css/

captn3m0• 4 months ago

The author links to th CSS x86 project:

Yes, Lyra Rebane build a x86 CPU completely in CSS, but that technique is simply not fast enough for handing the game loop. So the result is something that uses a lot of JavaScript.

rebane2001• 4 months ago

(author of x86css)

not only do i think doom in css is possible, but both me and another css person were also planning on actually making it into reality

but it sort of feels demotivating to see js-powered css projects like this hit the frontpage, because if we do eventually make a css-only doom people will think its a repost or nothing special

edit: and to be clear, that demotivation is more of a problem of how the internet, virality, and news cycles work. the actual project here is still pretty cool!

inopinatus• 4 months ago

I feel obliged to repeat my assertion that this evolution of CSS was inevitable and foreseeable and that the HTML Editorial Review Board should’ve chosen DSSSL in the first place.

sgbeal• 4 months ago

It would be really interesting to see this without the texturing applied.

lysace• 4 months ago

The game logic runs in JavaScript

Also: a modern CPU is around 10000x faster than the 486 CPU Doom was designed for. Per core.

rkagerer• 4 months ago

But where can I try it out in my browser?

EDIT: https://cssdoom.wtf/

TeMPOraL• 4 months ago

Never tried Doom on a phone before, this one is surprisingly fluid and very playable.

nine_k• 4 months ago

Works smoothly in Firefox. But the default key mapping is busted: fire at Alt means that it opens and closes the menu in Firefox with each press. Also, Alt + left arrow ends the game and goes back in history.

Interestingly, it was more choppy in Chromium.

I could not find a key for moving sideways ("strafing").

All in all, quite mind-boggling.

ranger207• 4 months ago

Strafing is implemented on A and D at least, but having one hand on the arrows to turn and WASD to move is a bizarre mix of modern and original controls

lights0123• 4 months ago

Interestingly, it was more choppy in Chromium.

Firefox's WebRender is truly a great creation. While Chrome is faster at most things especially involving JS, Firefox puts so much of its rendering on the GPU so moving elements around is incredibly fast.

edoceo• 4 months ago

There are some new key-trap ApIs that can handle that, IIRC FF don't handle that part as well as Chrome.

bethekidyouwant• 4 months ago

It works perfectly in Safari on mobile. this never happens.

_fzslm• 4 months ago

My phone IMMEDIATELY got toasty as I started moving around the world :')

notnmeyer• 4 months ago

at this point i’m more interested in what _can’t_ run doom.

josefrichter2• 4 months ago

scared to go check my washing machine display

anthk2• 4 months ago

I ran calypso.z3, tristam_island.z3 and a few more Zmachine text adventures under an interpreter created in PostScript.

Also if I want I can cross-compile a static build of Frotz for Linux/Misc and emulate it under a RISC interpreter for Linux syscalls written in... Perl, runable in every modern Perl port out there. Linux/RISC binary under Perl for NetBSD/Vax? Yes. Slow? Not much, it's a text game in the end.

But, as for the ZMachine, you can run text adventures in Android, Game Boy, Amiga, MSDOS, Windows, Palm PDA's... anything 8bit and up.

Also, damn Sokoban under Eforth written in Subleq, a VM which can just:

- set up a 2^16 RAM size

- single opcode: substract A from B, if less than 0, go to addr in C. - A < 0? Get ASCII input in B - B < 0? Put ASCII output in B - C < 0? End

This, just this, and people wrote Subleq simulators in C, AWK, Python, TCL, FPGA's and whatnot. And it will run Eforth, and that means... you can write a ZMachine interpreter on it and be really slow if emulated in a Pentium 4 (maybe 3/5 seconds per command with a ZMachine on top of Eforth for Muxleq instead of Subleq), but the game will be playable and a great exercise on Turing completeness.

If a Mandlebrot render under Muxleq+EForth (with no floats used, just integers) is as fast as a C64/Amiga with a native Forth. then having that tiny EForth+Muxleq is not that useless.

https://github.com/howerj/muxleq

josefrichter2• 4 months ago

this is wild.

anthk2• 4 months ago

https://freedom.github.io

Use Deutex, GNU make and Pillow for Python to compile.

Then wou will have up-to-date IWADS to be used aywhere. No need to put ID copyrights, just a mention to FreeDoom creators.

jsjsjxxnnd• 4 months ago

In recent years CSS has become closer to a full programming language through experimental features, for example in 2025 they added if statements and some math functions like modulo

https://www.simplethread.com/new-and-upcoming-css-features-i...

amelius2• 4 months ago

The only thing missing is the ergonomics of a real programming language.

cafebabbe2• 4 months ago

I like the declarative nature of it. It makes it so easy to debug anything, with "simple" introspection tools. I feel that many horrors will be created when we introduce control flow to CSS.

And this project kinda show how far you can go, still, if you really want it :D

senfiaj2• 4 months ago

It's not just closer. Someone wrote an x86 emulator with CSS (it uses JS only for clock to make it more reliable). https://lyra.horse/x86css/ . So, CSS is officially Turing complete (which is a bit scary IMHO).

MrDOS• 4 months ago

In 2006, Ars Technica published an April Fool's article[0] declaring that the perennially-forthcoming Duke Nukem Forever would finally see the light of day... as... a browser game! Ho ho, how droll.

Crazy to see how far we've come.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/04/forever/

w-ll• 4 months ago

Quake Live did come out as a browser NaCl game a year or so later.

hackernudes• 4 months ago

It was a traditional plugin (NPAPI), not NaCl (Native Client). Honestly a total gimmick. I still play Quake Live, though!

swyx• 4 months ago

thats wild that you can still link to a 2006 blogpost. kudos, ars technica.

socalgal2• 4 months ago

[flagged]

adi_kurian• 4 months ago

Really cool!

pverheggen• 4 months ago

Seriously impressive, especially the viewport culling trick, not seen that one before.

FYI if you want to use inspect element, the viewport div consumes mouse elements, you can get rid of this with

  #viewport {
    pointer-events: none;
  }
  #viewport * {
    pointer-events: initial;
  }

quantummagic• 4 months ago

This is great. And Firefox should get kudos too, for running it the best, with fewest workarounds needed.

h1fra2• 4 months ago

[flagged]

tomhow• 4 months ago

Please omit internet tropes on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id= and marked it off topic.

h1fra2• 4 months ago

So impressive! Bonus, you can wall hack by just deleting a div ahah

ehsankia• 4 months ago

Even better, since everything is well organized, you can add `opacity: 0.7` to `.wall` specifically, and get something that looks almost exactly like how old school wallhacks looked like.

hjkl0• 4 months ago

Is that a Doom reference? What’s a wall hack? How did it look?

sulplisetalk• 4 months ago

Yawn.

gfody• 4 months ago

super playable on ff but I got stuck here https://imgur.com/a/6nXbPY3

rox_kd• 4 months ago

Couldn't agree more ... Especially how platforms like Stitch 2 are eliminating the barriers for non-technical individuals to actually get pretty decent UI/UX experience ..

DarthCeltic85• 4 months ago

I LOVE this! You did a bang up job, is the skin change function coming in a future update?

malkosta• 4 months ago

What a master class in linear algebra…

Roshan_Roy• 4 months ago

This feels like one of those “because we can” projects that accidentally reveals where the platform is going.

CSS started as purely declarative styling, but between things like conditionals, math functions, and now these rendering tricks, it’s slowly creeping into “programmable system” territory. Not because it’s the right tool for it, but because browsers are becoming the real runtime. The interesting question isn’t “can Doom run in CSS”, it’s how much logic we’ll keep pushing into layers that were never meant to handle it.

rhdunn• 4 months ago

The question is really about where the boundary between presentation (CSS) and interactivity (JavaScript) lies.

For static content like documents the distinction is easy to determine. When you think about applications, widgets, and other interactive elements the line starts to blur.

Before things like flex layout, positioning content with a 100% height was hard, resulting in JavaScript being used for layout and positioning.

Positioning a dropdown menu, tooltip, or other content required JavaScript. Now you can specify the anchor position of the element via CSS properties. Determining which anchor position to use also required JavaScript, but with things like if() can now be done directly in CSS.

Implementing disclosure elements had to be done with a mix of JavaScript and CSS. Now you can use the details/summary elements and CSS to style the open/close states.

Animation effects when opening an element, on hover, etc. such as easing in colour transitions can easily be done in CSS now. Plus, with the reduced motion media query you can gate those effects to that user preference in CSS.

titzer• 4 months ago

It's abstraction inversion at its finest. Declarative styling sounded like a good idea, but it jumped the shark long ago. It's begging to become a real programming language but for some reason the design ethos behind CSS seems to have been avoiding programming at all costs--maybe that's to keep the browser renderer in control (and hopefully responsive), maybe it's because they didn't want designers to have to learn to program, maybe they just hate JS. Whatever the reason, it's clear that CSS took a wrong turn and mutated into absolutely the wrong abstraction.

dgb23• 4 months ago

The design of CSS has always been weak IMO. What we needed were general, simple primitives that can describe layout relationships and a compositional layer that includes some common defaults.

ticulatedspline• 4 months ago

My first thought along these lines was "do I now need a NoCSS plugin along with NoScript"

at what point is CSS powerful enough to become a malware vector.

efilife• 4 months ago

LLM generated comment

AndreyK1984• 4 months ago

I try a simple absolutely layout (all calculated on a server), and helps me a lot. 1) no reflow 2) very few exceptions 3) WAY EASIER FOR LLMs

ec109685• 4 months ago

Great example as to why people are yearning for CSS in TypeScript. Something as simple as if() only works in Chrome and there's not a good shim story for CSS versus a more complete language, so you end up with this:

The problem: CSS can compute a number – 0 for visible and 1 for hidden – but you can’t directly use that number to set visibility. There is a new feature coming to CSS that solves this: if(), but right now it only just shipped in Chrome.
So I used a trick called type grinding. You create a paused animation that toggles visibility between visible and hidden. Then you set the animation-delay based on the computed value to determine which keyframe is used:

  animation: cull-toggle 1s step-end paused;
  animation-delay: calc(var(--cull-outside) \* -0.5s);

  @keyframes cull-toggle {
    0%, 49.9% { visibility: visible; }
    50%, 100% { visibility: hidden; }
  }

> A negative animation delay on a paused animation jumps to that point in the timeline. So a delay of 0s lands in the visible range, and -0.5s lands in the hidden range. It’s a hack, but a functional one. When CSS if() gets wider support, we can replace this with a clean conditional. ```

x0999992• 4 months ago

itt: web developers continue to get more dumb

yakazaki_10• 4 months ago

The fact that CSS has evolved enough to pull off 3D rendering is wild. Makes me wonder where the ceiling actually is.

Dwedit• 4 months ago

"I used Claude to create an approximate version of the game loop in JavaScript based on the original DOOM source"

This is the real horror here, Uncanny-Valley gameplay Doom. It's like those Doom maps where people tried to recreate the game levels from memory, but still made a few mistakes and got some details wrong. This is like that, but for the gameplay rather than the level layouts. It's different enough to be wrong.

We have Green Armor that sets your armor to 200%. Health Bonuses that reset your health to 100% if you exceeded that number, too bad if you recently collected a Soul Sphere. Switch-activated doors that are supposed to stay open, but instead automatically close, but then the secret wall unexpectedly activates like a manual door.

madrox• 4 months ago

This is so disingenuous. You literally clipped the full sentence that changes the context significantly.

"Once I’ve proven to myself that rendering was feasible, I used Claude to create an approximate version of the game loop in JavaScript based on the original DOOM source, which to me is the least interesting part of the project"

This post is about whether you can render Doom in CSS not whether Claude can replicate Doom gameplay. I doubt the author even bothered to give the game loop much QA.

cafebabbe2• 4 months ago

Seriously? Your takeaway from this is bad armor bonus computations?

x0999992• 4 months ago

The fact that Claude is killing CSS officially means we need to switch back to IRC or something. AI is a parasite we cannot integrate but only avoid. (P.s. if you work in AI, stop, you are literally destructive to humanity.)

brettermeier• 4 months ago

How is Claude killing CSS? I don't get it.

AyanamiKaine2• 4 months ago

Its incredible how far concepts like CSS can be pushed. But sometimes I wonder what if CSS would be just JavaScript i.e both concept are merged.

Would that be better or worse for webdev? I don't know. But I like to ponder.

tgv• 4 months ago

I think it would be too easy to create an uncontrollable cascade of function calls, causing terrible performance. IMO, it's best to keep concerns separated. Perhaps the current JS/DOM interface is a bit cumbersome, but it gets a lot done. What is your reason for merging?

AyanamiKaine2• 4 months ago

What is your reason for merging?

Good question, I personally think that seperating by concerns is good. But when problems arise like boundaries that get crossed or compilers implementing language features into css like Sass, maybe it proves that those things are actually not two concerns but one.

Lately I am using Catch2 (a c++ testing framework) and wanted to benchmark some code. My first instinct was looking for a benchmark framework. But to my surprise Catch2 does also have a benchmarking framework included!.

Most people would argue that a testing framework should not include a benchmarking framework. But using it myself it showed me that both concerns of benchmarking for performance regressions and testing are similar.

Similar enough that I would prefer both of them together.

Most people, me included, are asking: "Should this be split into more?" But seldom, we ask: "Should this be merge into one?"

senfiaj2• 4 months ago

Someone wrote an x86 emulator with CSS (it uses JS only for clock to make it more reliable). https://lyra.horse/x86css/ . So, CSS is officially Turing complete (which is a bit scary IMHO).

mikax• 4 months ago

thats really cool

bradley13• 4 months ago

Is this a proof of how great CSS is?

Or is it proof that CSS has "jumped the shark", adding in a plethora of features that have no place in a "stylesheet"?

antisol• 4 months ago

Yeah. I came here to say: "this is awesome, but it's not evidence that css is awesome".

virtualritz2• 4 months ago

CSS is /the/ spec to look at to understand how awful something designed by committee gets.

In web specs closely rivaled by SVG.

You can pick which one is uglier and you'll be right.

creesch• 4 months ago

Be honest, did you just reply to the title and the title along even skipping the other comments?

virtualritz2• 4 months ago

I opened the article and read the first paragraph. Then skimmed the rest.

As others pointed out: the fact you can do this in CSS tells you everything you need to know if you consider what CSS is for. Even w/o ever looking at the spec or understanding how it came to be.

Levitating5• 4 months ago

Crazy that the future of software development now looks like we'll all be making UIs with specs that just a few years ago didn't allow you to trivially center a widget in a container.

b0ner_t0ner• 4 months ago

    IDDQD

and

    IDKFA

did not work unfortunately.

yourapostasy2• 4 months ago

While standalone CSS is not yet Turing complete, I worry about the new attack vector categories opened up by moving it towards that state. Already I believe attackers have a choice to spread the attack payload between CSS, HTML and JavaScript to evade current detectors and analysis at the network borders, and evade CSP's since we're well into undecidability territory, like using CSS attribute selectors if the CSP allows external images or fonts. But I'm far from proficient at web browser red teaming. Is this worry unfounded?

codethief2• 4 months ago

While standalone CSS is not yet Turing complete

Looks like it is, though? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558097

yourapostasy2• 4 months ago

Oh yep, looks Turing complete just not performant enough for that use case. But that’s not an issue for APT-style attacks that take their sweet time. So am I off base here?

saidnooneever• 4 months ago

just a small note on this very cool implementation and write up. you wrote modeling tools and animation stuff has camera that moves around.

i think ultimately, there also the world moves aroun the player and cameras are just a concept to make the frustrum etc (maybe modern tools do it differently, im a little out of date)

ionwake• 4 months ago

I feel there should be a gov dep where all the "i turned this into DOOM" folks get hired, to build the next spicy interplanetary propulsion systems. They are clearly needing an exotic task to stop twiddling their fingers.

art0rz• 4 months ago

They would just end up making the thing they're building run Doom.

andyjohnson0• 4 months ago

And then they would find a way to make that embedded Doom run the thing that they are building [1]. Possibly inside a cellular automaton.

[1] Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom https://blog.otterstack.com/posts/202212-doom-calculator/

SuzukiBrian• 4 months ago

Within a week they would have a rocket prototype where you can plug in a mouse and keyboard and play doom on the exhaust flames by mixing different fuel chemicals.

phplovesong• 4 months ago

But can it run crysis?

TZubiri• 4 months ago

While running Doom on X is typically a show of personal hacking skills, and a display of the turing completeness/power of X,

I think that running Doom on X can also be a criticism of X, certainly the opposite of the intention in some cases. Consider a config mechanicsm, if I prove that I can run Doom on .md or .ini, or notepad.exe, most people should be concerned, not just for bloat, but for security reasons.

The value of some tech is precisely in what it cannot do, not just what it can do.

kuberwastaken• 4 months ago

Beautiful. Art.

AndreasMoeller• 4 months ago

Perfect!

batisteo• 4 months ago

I remember when we needed 4 gifs to make rounded corners on a div

_joel• 4 months ago

div tags? pah, I remember when all this were tables lad.

vardump• 4 months ago

Tables? Bah. I remember when all of this were image maps instead.

nickcageinacage• 4 months ago

soooooooo cooool thank you

mcparchtect• 4 months ago

soo good

gigatexal• 4 months ago

Never ceases to amaze me what people will port doom to

CSS is DOOMed

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