This article was written in 2013. It might or it might not be outdated. And it could be that the layout breaks. If that’s the case please let me know.

CSS Day 2013

Last Friday I went to the most nerdy conference I ever attended. It was also one of the conferences I enjoyed most. On a nice sunny day in Amsterdam, eight top nerds talked about eight different CSS modules on CSS Day 2013. There were talks about the future, but there were also talks about things that most of us didn’t know about the modules we use every day.

History

Bert Bos for instance — one of the people who invented CSS — talked about selectors. Most of the selectors he showed were very common, and everybody knew them. But the thing that I found fascinating about his talk, was the small history lesson he gave in the beginning. He explained the assumptions the inventors of CSS had about the language. It was meant for simple documents with high quality typography, but with simple spatial arrangements. In other words, it was designed to be used for single column layouts with a lot of text in it. Something else was needed for more complex documents, they assumed. And something different was needed for GUIs. But nothing better was created and that’s why we started using CSS to solve problems it was never designed for.

Now

But things have changed. CSS is in very active development. If I remember what Daniel Glazman said correctly, the CSS Working Group is working on 60 different documents at the moment. That’s a lot. Combine this knowledge with the fact that browsers are updated every six weeks, and you understand that CSS is the shit. Many specs are being written on layout modules, on visual effects, and on developer workflow.

Did I learn anything on CSS Day?

I always learn something at a conference. I learned more at this one. I finally understand the theory behind flexbox for instance. Stephen Hay gave an incredible talk on this subject. Hilarious and informative at the same time, a true masterpiece. Flexbox is meant to create interfaces, it’s not really suitable for layouts. Right now browser support is a bit of a mess because of different implementations, but this should be fixed in the near future.

I learned some very clever @font-face hacks. Eric Meyer did a talk on this subject in which he showed us how to use the unicode-range property to use a different font-family for different letters without the need to use a different name. Clever, clever stuff. Can’t wait for the video.

I learned a thing or two about animations and transitions from an excellent talk by Peter Gasston. I also learned some stuff about the visual eye-candy that Adobe (mostly) is developing. Divya Manian showed us the things that many visual designers want, like filters and composite layers (the so called blend modes in Photoshop).

Highlights

All speakers were absolute experts on the field they were talking about, and they all did an incredible job. Most speakers though, were not the expert on their field, because the expert on almost every field is Tab Atkins. And Tab was there. This led to funny situations. After every talk people from the public could ask questions to the speaker. While they could answer most of these questions themselves, many questions were answered by Tab. I think it was Peter Gasston who ended his talk with the words I think we have some time left for questions for Tab. His presence made this day even better than it already was.

The last talk of the day was a talk about border-radius by Lea Verou. In forty-five minutes she showed us what you can do with it. And that’s much, much more than you probably think. As always, her talk was incredible. Her live coding skills are unique. Most people fuck up while typing code on stage, Lea just keeps talking while she types four different CSS-gradients. Only machines and Lea know how to type gradients. Fantastic as always.

More CSS Days please!

I really enjoyed this conference. I loved the focus. No distractions from talks on subjects that are only mildly interesting. Just talks about CSS on a high level. Brilliant. The organisers say that this was a one time event, I don’t believe them. There ‘s so much happening with CSS right now, a CSS Day could easily be organised every two years, probably every year too. Looking forward to it.