CSS isn't, insofar as I know, Turing complete. But my knowledge of CSS is very limited.
- Is CSS Turing complete?
- Are any of the existing draft or committees considering language features that might enable Turing completeness if it isn't right now?
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296answers:
4
+4
A:
As per this article, it's not. The article also argues that it's not a good idea to make it one.
To quote from one of the comments:
So, I do not believe that CSS is turing complete. There is no capability to define a function in CSS. In order for a system to be turing-complete it has to be possible to write an interpreter: a function that interprets expressions that denote programs to execute. CSS has no variables that are directly accessible to the user; so you cannot even model the structure that represents the program to be interpreted in CSS.
DVK
2010-03-23 02:23:08
CSS isn't executable in any way. The person who wrote the quoted comment doesn't seem to understand that. :-\
Ryan Prior
2010-03-23 03:01:13
CSS is a set of instructions to a processor (layout engine). What's so not "executable" about it?
DVK
2010-03-23 03:26:24
+4
A:
CSS is not a programming language, so the question of turing-completeness is a meaningless one. If programming extensions are added to CSS such as was the case in IE6 then that new synthesis is a whole different thing.
CSS is merely a description of styles; it does not have any logic, and its structure is flat.
Ryan Prior
2010-03-23 02:30:11
Also (IIRC), there is some ambiguity about which styles take precedence when multiple conflicting (duplicate) styles are used. And then there is the slightly different ways that different browsers implement/interpret markup styles to deal with.
Loadmaster
2010-03-23 02:40:16
*"CSS is not a programming language, so the question of turing-completeness is a meaningless one."* Tautological sentences are tautological.
Adam Davis
2010-03-23 13:10:26
A:
CSS doesn't have conditionals or branching (lacks the if statement), so it can't be a Turing-complete language.
CSS is just a presentation extension to HTML and markup languages can't be Turing-complete.
omgzor
2010-08-24 05:33:33