Is the Craft of Writing CSS About to Die?

In the 1950s, if you wanted premium print—wedding invites, packaging, letterheads—you went to the die stamper.

Heavy metal plates. Pressure. Precision. Each indentation a mark of craftsmanship.

Then came litho. Faster. Cheaper. Die stamping started to feel… nostalgic.

Then digital. No plates. No mess. Anyone with a laptop could do what once took a workshop and years of skill.

Three waves. Each more accessible. Each shrinking the craft before it.

The web followed the same pattern.

First: raw HTML. Static. Rigid. Just structure.

Then CSS. Suddenly, websites could be beautiful and functional. But it was still hand-crafted—finicky and fragile.

Then tools like HotMetal Pro, Dreamweaver, FrontPage. The litho era of the web. Templates. WYSIWYG. Speed.

Then frameworks: Bootstrap, Tailwind. Systemised. Scalable. Design at scale.

Now? No-code builders. Gutenberg. Webflow. The digital print age of the web.

And maybe the next wave is already forming: vibe coding. Front-ends built by feel. Less rules. More intuition. More soul.

About 20 years ago, I was helping lead a business with several sites across the UK. One of them, based in Birmingham, still had two master die stampers. Their work was beautiful—but the demand was already niche. When they retired, that part of the business quietly faded with them.

Will hand-crafting websites with CSS become the new die stamping?

Only time will tell.