CSS Secrets

Preface

In the past few years, CSS has undergone a transformation, similar to the JavaScript revolution circa 2004. It went from being a dead-simple styling language with limited power, to a complex technology defined by over 80 W3C specifications (including drafts), with its own developer ecosystem, its own conferences, and its own frameworks and tooling. CSS has grown so much that it’s practically impossible for any single person to hold all of it in their brain. Even in the W3C CSS Working Group that defines the language, nobody is an expert on every single aspect of CSS—and few even come close. Instead, most WG members focus on certain CSS specifications and might know very little about others.

Up until roughly 2009, CSS expertise was not defined by how well the language was known. This was more or less a given for any serious CSS work. Instead, CSS prowess was defined by the number of browser bugs and workarounds that had been committed to memory. Fast-forward to 2015, and browsers are now designed to support standards, and flimsy browser-specific hacks are frowned upon. There are still some unavoidable incompatibilities, but—especially because most browsers now auto-update—the pace of change is so fast, that attempting to document them in a book would be a waste of time and space.

The challenge in modern CSS has little to do with working around transient browser bugs. The challenge now is using the CSS features we have in a creative way, in order to come up with DRY, maintainable, ...