It is certainly valuable to do stuff in CSS instead of Javascript to a certain degree. Especially the small gimmicks that add a little visual touch but isn't part of your core functionality. E.g. some CSS3 transition animations. Doing stuff in JavaScript is slower and more error prone.
The recent trend of trying to do everything in only CSS3 without Javascript is mostly a challenge for the developer and some of that stuff serves no actual value. For example, many people have been doing some icons with CSS3, by creating a bazillion elements in the DOM tree and adding CSS3 styles. That serves no practical purpose whatsoever, since the HTML+CSS required probably takes more space than the image it's replacing and is very slow to process and render for the browser.
CSS can be used to do practical icons and buttons, though. Instead of trying to create a pixel perfect replica of a bitmap, you can do pretty nice icons by using a nice unicode symbol (or text), and put some rounded corners, a neat gradient and a drop shadow.
If only people would stop using absolute pixel sizes in their CSS stylesheets, we could get pretty nice scalable (as in screen size) Web UI's.
The recent trend of trying to do everything in only CSS3 without Javascript is mostly a challenge for the developer and some of that stuff serves no actual value. For example, many people have been doing some icons with CSS3, by creating a bazillion elements in the DOM tree and adding CSS3 styles. That serves no practical purpose whatsoever, since the HTML+CSS required probably takes more space than the image it's replacing and is very slow to process and render for the browser.
CSS can be used to do practical icons and buttons, though. Instead of trying to create a pixel perfect replica of a bitmap, you can do pretty nice icons by using a nice unicode symbol (or text), and put some rounded corners, a neat gradient and a drop shadow.
If only people would stop using absolute pixel sizes in their CSS stylesheets, we could get pretty nice scalable (as in screen size) Web UI's.