ADR-0016 · No CSS Houdini
Status: Rejected
emroute does not adopt CSS Houdini APIs (Paint, Layout, Animation Worklet, Typed OM).
Why
The production-ready Houdini APIs (@property, Typed OM) don't fix emroute's actual CSS pain points — those are about cascade, scoping, and shadow boundaries, not type-safe property reads. The Houdini APIs that would help (Paint, Layout) are Chromium-only with no roadmap from other vendors.
Houdini stalled because only Chrome invested. Building features on top of one-vendor APIs gives consumers cliff-edge compatibility — a feature that works in one browser and silently does nothing in others. That's worse than the original problem.
The real solutions live in mainstream CSS: @scope, @layer, :defined, Declarative Shadow DOM, container queries. These ship everywhere and address the same problems Houdini was supposed to solve.