Journal tags: cssday

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CSS Day 2024

My stint as one of the hosts of CSS Day went very well indeed. I enjoyed myself and people seemed to like the cut of my jib.

During the event there was a real buzz on Mastodon, which was heartening to see. I was beginning to worry that hashtagging events was going to be collatoral damage from Elongate, but there was plenty of conference-induced FOMO to be experienced on the fediverse.

The event itself was, as always, excellent. Both in terms of content and organisation.

Some themes emerged during CSS Day, which I always love to see. These emergent properties are partly down to curation and partly down to serendipity.

The last few years of CSS Day have felt like getting a firehose of astonishing new features being added to the language. There was still plenty of cutting-edge stuff this year—masonry! anchor positioning!—but there was also a feeling of consolidation, asking how to get all this amazing new stuff into our workflows.

Matthias’s opening talk on day one and Stephen’s closing talk on the same day complemented one another perfectly. Both managed to inspire while looking into the nitty-gritty practicalities of the web design process.

It was, astoundingly, Matthias’s first ever conference talk. I have no doubt it won’t be the last—it was great!

I gave Stephen a good-natured roast in my introduction, partly because it was his birthday, partly because we’re old friends, but mostly because it was enjoyable for me to watch him squirm. Of course his talk was, as always, superb. Don’t tell him, but he might be one of my favourite speakers.

The topic of graphic design tools came up more than once. It’s interesting to see how the issues with them have changed. It used to be that design tools—Photoshop, Sketch, Figma—were frustrating because they were writing cheques that CSS couldn’t cash. Now the frustration is the exact opposite. Our graphic design tools aren’t capable of the kind of fluid declarative design we can now accomplish in web browsers.

But the biggest rift remains not with tools or technologies, but with people and mindsets. Our tools can reinforce mindsets but the real divide happens in how different people approach CSS.

Both Josh and Kevin get to the heart of this in their tremendous tutorials, and that was reflected in their talks. They showed the difference between having the bare minimum understanding of CSS in order to get something done as quickly as possible, and truly understanding how CSS works in order to open up a world of possibilities.

For people in the first category, Sarah Dayan was there to sing the praises of utility-first CSS AKA atomic CSS. I commend her bravery!

During the Q&A, I restrained myself from being too Paxmanish. But I did have l’esprit d’escalier afterwards when I realised that the entire talk—and all the answers afterwards—depended on two mutually-incompatiable claims:

  1. The great thing about atomic CSS is that it’s a constrained vocabulary so your team has to conform, and
  2. The other great thing about it is that it’s utility-first, not utility-only so you can break out of it and use regular CSS if you want.

Insert .gif of character from The Office looking to camera.

Most of the questions coming in during the Q&A reflected my own take: how about we use utility classes for some things, but not all things. Seems sensible.

Anyway, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about the substance of what Sarah was saying, there was no denying that it was a great presentation. They were all great presentations. That’s unusual, and I say that as a conference organiser as well as an attendee. Everyone brings their A-game to CSS Day.

Mind you, it is exhausting. I say it every year, but it always feels like one talk too many. Not that any individual talk wasn’t good, but the sheer onslaught of deep dives into the innards of CSS has my brain exploding before the day is done.

A highlight for me was getting to introduce Fantasai’s talk on the design principles of CSS, which was right up my alley. I don’t think most people realise just how much we owe her for her years of work on standards. The web would be in a worse place without the Herculean work she’s done behind the scenes.

Another highlight was getting to see some of the students I met back in March. They were showing some of their excellent work during the breaks. I find what they’re doing just as inspiring as the speakers on stage.

In fact, when I was filling in the post-conference feedback form, there was a question: “Who would you like to see speak at CSS Day next year?” I was racking my brains because everyone I could immediately think of has already spoken at some point. So I wrote, “It would be great to see some of those students speaking about their work.”

I think it would be genuinely fascinating to get their perspective on what we consider modern CSS, which to them is just CSS.

Either way I’ll back next year for sure.

It’s funny, but usually when a conference is described as “inspiring” it’s because it’s tackling big galaxy-brain questions. But CSS Day is as nitty-gritty as it gets and I found it truly inspiring. Like, I couldn’t wait to open up my laptop and start writing some CSS. That kind of inspiring.

Hosting

I haven’t spoken at any conferences so far this year, and I don’t have any upcoming talks. That feels weird. I’m getting kind of antsy to give a talk.

I suspect my next talk will have something to do with HTML web components. If you’re organising an event and that sounds interesting to you, give me a shout.

But even though I’m not giving a conference talk this year, I’m doing a fair bit of hosting. There was the lovely Patterns Day back in March. And this week I’m off to Amsterdam to be one of the hosts of CSS Day. As always, I’m very much looking forward to that event.

Once that’s done, it’ll be time for the biggie. UX London is just two weeks away—squee!

There are still tickets available. If you haven’t got yours yet, I highly recommend getting it before midnight on Friday—that’s when the regular pricing ends. After that, it’ll be last-chance passes only.

Junevents

Every week of June sees me at a web event, but in a different capacity each time.

At the end of the first full week in June, I went to CSS Day in Amsterdam as an attendee. It was thought-provoking, as always. And it was great to catch up with my front-of-the-front-end friends.

Last week I went to Pixel Pioneers in Bristol as a speaker. Fortunately I was on first so I was able to get the speaking done with and enjoy the rest of the talks. It was a lovely little event and there was yet more catching up with old friends and making new ones.

This week is the big one. UX London is happening this week. This time I’m not there as an attendee or a speaker. I’m there as the curator and host.

On the one hand, I’m a bag of nerves. I’ve been preparing for this all year and now it’s finally happening. I keep thinking of all the things that could possibly go wrong.

On the other hand, I’m ridiculously excited. I know I should probably express some modesty, but looking at the line-up I’ve assembled, I feel an enormous sense of pride. I’m genuinely thrilled at the prospect of all those great talks and workshops.

Nervous and excited. Those are the two wolves inside me right now.

If you’re going to be at UX London, I hope that you’re equally excited (and not nervous). There are actually still some last-minute tickets available if you haven’t managed to get one yet.

See you there!

Days of style and standards

I first spoke at CSS Day in Amsterdam back in 2016. Well, technically it was the HTML Day preceding CSS Day, when I talked about the A element. I spoke at CSS Day again last year, when I gave a presentation about alternative histories of styling.

One of the advantages to having spoken at the event in the past is that I’m offered a complementary ticket to the event every year. That’s an offer I’ve made the most of.

I’ve just returned from the latest iteration of CSS Day. It was, as always, excellent. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I just love the way that this event treats CSS with the respect it deserves. I always attend thinking “I know CSS”, but I always leave thinking “I learned a lot about CSS!”

The past few years have been incredibly exciting for the language. We’ve been handed feature after feature, including capabilities we were told just weren’t possible: container queries; :has; cascade layers; view transitions!

As Paul points out in his write-up, there’s been a shift in how these features feel too. In the past, the feeling was “there’s some great stuff arriving and it’ll be so cool once we’ve got browser support.” Now the feeling is finally catching up to the reality: these features are here now. If browser support for an exciting feature is still an issue, wait a few weeks.

Mind you, as Paul also points out, maybe that’s down to the decreased diversity in rendering engines. If a feature ships in Chromium, Webkit, and Gecko, then it’s universally supported. On the one hand, that’s great for developers. But on the other hand, it’s not ideal for the ecosystem of the web.

Anyway, as expected, there was a ton of mind-blowing stuff at CSS Day 2023. Most of the talks were deep dives into specific features. Those deep dives were bookended by big-picture opening and closing talks.

Manuel closed out the show by talking about he’s changing the way he writes and thinks about CSS. I think that’s a harbinger of what’s to come in the next year or so. We’ve had this wonderful burst of powerful new features over the past couple of years; I think what we’ll see next is consolidation. Understanding how these separate pieces play well together is going to be very powerful.

Heck, just exploring all the possibilities of custom properties and :has could be revolutionary. When you add in the architectural implications of cascade layers and container queries, it feels like a whole new paradigm waiting to happen.

That was the vibe of Una’s opening talk too. It was a whistle-stop tour of all the amazing features that have already landed, and some that will be with us very soon.

But Una also highlighted the heartbreaking disparity between the brilliant reality of CSS in browsers today versus how the language is perceived.

Look at almost any job posting for front-end development and you’ll see that CSS still isn’t valued as its own skill. Never mind that you could specialise in a subset of CSS—layout, animation, architecture—and provide 10× value to an organisation, the recruiters are going to play it safe and ask you if you know React.

Rachel Nabors and I were chatting about this gap between the real and perceived value of modern CSS. She astutely pointed out that CSS is kind of a victim of its own resilience. The way you wrote CSS ten years ago still works, and will continue to work. That’s by design. Yes, you can write much better, more resilient CSS today, but if those qualities aren’t valued by an organisation, then you’re casting your pearls before swine.

That said, it’s also true that the JavaScript you wrote ten years ago also continues to work today and will continue to work in the future. So why is it that devs seem downright eager to try the latest JavaScript hotness but are reluctant to use CSS that’s been stable for years?

Or perhaps that’s not an accurate representation of the JavaScript ecosystem. It may well be that the eagerness only extends to libraries and frameworks. There’s reluctance to embrace native JavaScript APIs like Proxy or web components. There’s a weird lack of trust in web standards, and an underserved faith in third-party libraries.

Una speculated that CSS needs a rebranding, like we did back in the days of CSS3, a term which didn’t have any technical meaning but helped galvinise excitement.

I’m not so sure. A successful rebranding today becomes a millstone tomorrow. Again, see CSS3.

Una finished with a call-to-action. Let’s work on building the CSS community.

She compared the number of “front-end” conferences dedicated to JavaScript—over 50 listed on one website—to the number of conferences dedicated to CSS. There’s just one. CSS Day.

Heydon wrote:

It occurs to me there are two types of web conferences: know-your-craft conferences and get-ahead conferences. It’s no coincidence there are simultaneously more get-ahead conferences and more JS-framework conferences.

Una encouraged us to organise more gatherings. It doesn’t need to be a conference. It could just be a local meet-up.

I think that’s an excellent suggestion. As Manuel puts it:

My biggest takeaway: The CSS community needs you!

For me, the value of CSS Day was partly in the excellent content being presented, but it was also in the opportunity to gather with like-minded individuals and realise I’m not alone. It’s also too easy to get gaslit by the grift of “modern web development”, which seems to be built on a foundation of user-hostile priorities that don’t make sense to me—over-engineering, intertwingling of concerns, and developer experience über alles. CSS Day was a welcome reminder to fuck that noise.

Talking about style

I’ve published a transcription of the talk I gave at CSS Day:

In And Out Of Style.

The title is intended to have double meaning. The obvious reference is that CSS is about styling web pages. But the talk also covers some long-term trends looking at ideas that have appear, disappear, and reappear over time. Hence, style as in trends and fashion.

There are some hyperlinks in the transcript but I also published a list of links if you’re interested in diving deeper into some of the topics mentioned in the talk.

I also published the slides but, as usual, they don’t make much sense out of context. They’re on Noti.st too.

I made an audio recording for your huffduffing pleasure.

There are two videos of this talk. On Vimeo, there’s the version I pre-recorded for An Event Apart online. On YouTube, there’s the recording from CSS Day.

It’s kind of interesting to compare the two (well, interesting to me, anyway). The pre-recorded version feels like a documentary. The live version has more a different vibe and it obviously has more audience interaction. I think my style of delivery suits a live audience best.

I invite you to read, watch, or listen to In And Out Of Style, whichever you prefer.

CSS Day 2022

I was in Amsterdam two weeks ago for CSS Day. It was glorious!

I mean, even without the conference it was just so nice to travel somewhere—by direct train, no less!—and spend some time in a beautiful European city enjoying the good weather.

And of course the conference was great too. I’ve been to CSS Day many times. I love it although technically it should be CSS days now—the conference runs for two days.

It’s an event that really treats CSS for what it is—a powerful language worthy of respect. Also, it has bitterballen.

This time I wasn’t just there as an attendee. I also had the pleasure of opening up the show. I gave a talk called In And Out Of Style, a look at the history—and alternative histories—of CSS.

The video is already online! I’ll get the talk transcribed and publish the text here soon. Meanwhile here’s a list of links to relevant material.

I really, really enjoyed giving this talk. It was so nice to be speaking to a room—or in this case, a church—with real people. I’m done giving talks to my screen. It’s just not the same. Giving this talk made me realise how much I need that feedback from the crowd—the laughs, the nods, maybe even the occasional lightbulb appearing over someone’s head.

As usual, my talk was broad and philosophical in nature. Big-picture pretentious talks are kind of my thing. In this case, I knew that I could safely brush over the details of all the exciting new CSS stuff I mentioned because other talks would be diving deep. And boy, did they ever dive deep!

It’s a cliché to use the adjective “inspiring” to describe a conference, but given all that’s happening in the world of CSS right now, it was almost inevitable that CSS Day would be very inspiring indeed this year. Cascade layers, scoped styles, container queries, custom properties, colour spaces, animation and much much more.

If anything, it was almost too much. If I had one minor quibble with the event it would be that seven talks in a day felt like one talk too many to my poor brain (I think that Marc gets the format just right with Beyond Tellerrand—two days of six talks each). But what a great complaint to have—that there was a glut of great talks!

They’ve already announced the dates for next year’s CSS Day(s): June 8th and 9th, 2023. I strongly suspect that I’ll be there.

Thank you very much to ppk, Krijn, Martijn, and everyone involved in making this year’s CSS Day so good!

Speaking at CSS Day 2022

I’m very excited about speaking at CSS Day this year. My talk is called In And Out Of Style:

It’s an exciting time for CSS! It feels like new features are being added every day. And yet, through it all, CSS has managed to remain an accessible language for anyone making websites. Is this an inevitable part of the design of CSS? Or has CSS been formed by chance? Let’s take a look at the history—and some alternative histories—of the World Wide Web to better understand where we are today. And then, let’s cast our gaze to the future!

Technically, CSS Day won’t be the first outing for this talk but it will be the in-person debut. I had the chance to give the talk online last week at An Event Apart. Giving a talk online isn’t quite the same as speaking on stage, but I got enough feedback from the attendees that I’m feeling confident about giving the talk in Amsterdam. It went down well with the audience at An Event Apart.

If the description has you intrigued, come along to CSS Day to hear the talk in person. And if you like the subject matter, I’ve put together these links to go with the talk…

Blog posts

Presentations

Proposals (email)

Papers (PDF)

People (Wikipedia)

Upcoming events

I see that Russell is planning to bring back Interesting this year. This makes me happy. Just seeing the return of in-person gatherings—run safely—is giving me life.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that lots of people are yearning for some in-person contact after two years of online events. The good news is that there are some excellent in-person web conferences on the horizon.

Beyond Tellerrand is back in Düsseldorf on May 2nd and 3rd. Marc ran some of the best online events during lockdown with his Stay Curious cafés, but there’s nothing beats the atmosphere of Beyond Tellerrand on its home turf.

If you can’t make it Düsseldorf—I probably can’t because I’m getting my passport renewed right now—there’s All Day Hey in Leeds on May 5th. Harry has put a terrific line-up together for this one-day, very affordable event.

June is shaping up to be a good month for events too. First of all, there’s CSS Day in Amsterdam on June 9th and 10th. I really, really like this event. I’m not just saying that because I’m speaking at this year’s CSS Day. I just love the way that the conference treats CSS with respect. If you self-identigy as a CSS person, then this is the opportunity to be with your people.

But again, if you can’t make it Amsterdam, never fear. The Pixel Pioneers conference returns to Bristol on June 10th. Another one-day event in the UK with a great line-up.

Finally, there’s the big one at the end of June. UX London runs from June 28th to June 30th:

Bringing the UX community back together

Yes, I’m biased because I’m curating the line-up but this is shaping up to be unmissable! It’s going to be so good to gather with our peers and get our brains filled by the finest of design minds.

CSS

Last month I went to CSS Day in Amsterdam, as an attendee this year, not a speaker. It was an excellent conference comprising the titular CSS day and a Browser API Special the day before.

By the end of CSS Day, my brain was full. Experiencing the depth of knowledge that’s contained in CSS now made me appreciate how powerful a language it is. I mean, the basics of CSS—selectors, properties, and values—can be grasped in a day. But you can spend a lifetime trying to master the details. Heck, you could spend a lifetime trying to master just one part of CSS, like layout, or text. And there would always be more to learn.

Unlike a programming language that requires knowledge of loops, variables, and other concepts, CSS is pretty easy to pick up. Maybe it’s because of this that it has gained the reputation of being simple. It is simple in the sense of “not complex”, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Mistaking “simple” for “easy” will only lead to heartache.

I think that’s what’s happened with some programmers coming to CSS for the first time. They’ve heard it’s simple, so they assume it’s easy. But then when they try to use it, it doesn’t work. It must be the fault of the language, because they know that they are smart, and this is supposed to be easy. So they blame the language. They say it’s broken. And so they try to “fix” it by making it conform to a more programmatic way of thinking.

I can’t help but think that they would be less frustrated if they would accept that CSS is not easy. Simple, yes, but not easy. Using CSS at scale has a learning curve, just like any powerful technology. The way to deal with that is not to hammer the technology into a different shape, but to get to know it, understand it, and respect it.

Talking about hypertext

#CSSday starts off with a great history lesson of our industry by @adactio

I’ve just published a transcript of the talk I gave at the HTML Special that preceded CSS Day a couple of weeks back. I’ve also recorded an audio version for your huffduffing pleasure.

It’s not like the usual talks I give. The subject matter was assigned to me, Mission Impossible style. PPK wanted each speaker to give an entire talk on just one HTML element. He offered me the best element of them all: the A element.

There were a few different directions I could’ve taken it. I could’ve tried to make it practical, but I quickly dismissed that idea. Instead I went in the completely opposite direction, making it as pretentious as possible. I figured a talk about hypertext could afford to be winding and circuitous, building on some of the ideas I wrote about in my piece for The Manual a few years back. It’s quite self-indulgent of me, but I used it as an opportunity to geek out about some of my favourite things; from Borges, Babbage, and Bletchley to Leibniz, Lovelace, and Licklider.

I wouldn’t usually write out an entire talk word-for-word in advance, but somehow it felt right for this one. In fact, my talk preparation this time ‘round was very similar to the process Charlotte recently wrote about:

  1. Get everything out of my head and onto a mind map.
  2. Write chunks of content in short bursts—this was when I was buddying up with Paul.
  3. Put together a slide deck of visuals to support the narrative.
  4. Practice delivering the talk so I don’t look I’m just reading off a screen.

It takes me a long time to prepare talks. As the deadline for this one approached, I was getting quite panicked. It was touch and go there for a while, but I managed to get it done in time.

I’m pleased with how it turned out. On the day, I had fun delivering it. People seemed to like it too, which was gratifying.

Although with this kind of talk, it was inevitable that I wouldn’t be able to please everyone.

I guess this talk was a one-off affair. That said, if you’re putting on an event and you think this subject matter would be appropriate, let me know. I’d be more than happy to deliver it again.

Amsterdam Brighton Amsterdam

I’m about to have a crazy few days that will see me bouncing between Brighton and Amsterdam.

It starts tomorrow. I’m flying to Amsterdam in the morning and speaking at this Icons event in the afternoon about digital preservation and long-term thinking.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be opening up the inaugural HTML Special which is a new addition the CSS Day conference. Each talk on Thursday will cover one HTML element. I am honoured to speaking about the A element. Here’s the talk description:

The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…

Enquire within upon everything.

I’ve been working all out to get this talk done and I finally wrapped it up today. Right now, I feel pretty happy with it, but I bet I’ll change that opinion in the next 48 hours. I’m pretty sure that this will be one of those talks that people will either love or hate, kind of like my 2008 dConstruct talk, The System Of The World.

After CSS Day, I’ll be heading back to Brighton on Saturday, June 18th to play a Salter Cane gig in The Greys pub. If you’re around, you should definitely come along—not only is it free, but there will be some excellent support courtesy of Jon London, and Lucas and King.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be speaking at DrupalCamp Brighton, opening up day two of the event. I won’t be able to stick around long afterwards though, because I need to skidaddle to the airport to go back to Amsterdam!

Google are having their Progressive Web App Dev Summit there on Monday on Tuesday. I’ll be moderating a panel on the second day, so I’ll need to pay close attention to all the talks. I’ll be grilling representatives from Google, Samsung, Opera, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Considering my recent rants about some very bad decisions on the part of Google’s Chrome team, it’s very brave of them to ask me to be there, much less moderate a panel in public.

You can still register for the event, by the way. Like the Salter Cane gig, it’s free. But if you can’t make it along, I’d still like to know what you think I should be asking the panelists about.

Got a burning question for browser/device makers? Write it down, post it somewhere on the web with a link back to this post, and then send me a web mention (there’s a form for you to paste in the URL at the bottom of this post).