CSS Day 2024

There was a great deal of positivity online surrounding last year’s CSS Day and I was disappointed to have not attended. In fact, I didn’t just miss it in 2023, but every year prior.

I was clearly missing a trick, so I endeavoured to attend in 2024, and was delighted when Rich told me there was a ticket with my name on it a few months ago.

And so, last week I packed my bags and headed to Amsterdam to attend CSS Day for the first time.

The fourteen speakers delivered their talks across two days. That’s a lot of concentration, but the quality, content and pacing of the talks struck a balance between gripping and digestible, meaning I was able to enjoy every last one of them.

Across the two days, three themes emerged.

Designing in the browser

Many of the talks, including Matthias Ott’s opener from day one, discussed the implications of the rapid rate of development within CSS. These days, features are arriving in browsers before they can be represented in design tools, and some dynamic features simply cannot be recreated in a static design. These features can liberate designers; allowing them to seek inspiration from a wider range of mediums than before for their work.

Because of this, front-end developers have a responsibility to demonstrate what is now possible to the visual designers they work with. Moreover, they have an opportunity to intercept the traditional design process by presenting prototypes produced - without any design involvement - in the browser, which designers can then polish into a production-worthy state.

This “hot-potato” way of working - a fast-paced back-and-forth between designer and developer - squarely opposes the waterfall methodology of old. And, an iterative design process that sees designers and developers working in harmony minimises the risk of design work being done that cannot be replicated in browser.

At Clearleft, we call this way of working “design engineering”. I love working in this way, so was pleased to see it evangelised to a wide audience.

Writing CSS for fun

CSS Day was packed with fascinating demos. These demos spanned all the way from apparent practicality to whimsical art. Julie Miocene’s talk was a joyful example of the latter, in which she walked us through rendering 3D characters with just HTML and CSS.

The interesting thing is that many of the demos, regardless of their manner, shared an important sentiment. This is that experimentation, purely for the sake of fun, is a totally valid reason to fire up your code editor. It’s all too easy to get caught up producing only the highest quality work.

Whether it was Kevin Powell’s example of over engineering a CSS layout, or Stephen Hay reminding us all of the healthy constraints enforced by the CSS Zen Garden, the ethos of making things for fun - and working out their utility later - echoed throughout the conference.

Since the conference, I’ve been tinkering in Codepen more than usual. I hope that some of that will make its way into my work, but I’m also totally okay if some of it doesn’t - I will have enjoyed myself and learnt a thing or two in the process, and that’s good enough for me.

The future is now

As I’ve mentioned, new CSS is coming at us thick and fast. Tab Atkins-Bittner and Carmen Ansio spoke about anchor positioning and the Scroll Timeline API, respectively. Much was said about masonry layouts by both Rachel Andrew and Nicole Sullivan. It’s all very exciting!

And what’s more exciting is gone are the days where we have to wait an age to get these features in browsers. Several of the speakers are members of the CSSWG and their work deserves the praise it receives. It, combined with the parallel efforts of the teams engineering browsers, means there has never been a more exciting time to be a front-end developer.

Additional motivation came in the form of Roma Komarov’s talk, which will spur me on to delve into the proposals and drafts produced by the CSSWG, experiment with them, and contribute to them where possible. Knowing the CSSWG reads these contributions, and factors them in to the final specifications is amazing.

The speakers were all brilliant - I’ve not mentioned them all here - but everyone spoke with enthusiasm and gave me plenty to think about. I also got to meet some great people, speakers and attendees alike. The new friends you make are the unsung heroes of an event like this.

This year marked the tenth edition of CSS Day. It’s also been ten years since I first started to learn web development and indeed CSS. I like the serendipity of that.

A decade ago, it was CSS that captured my imagination and altered my trajectory from being a wannabe graphic designer to becoming a front-end developer.

I have returned from Amsterdam feeling excited and inspired to funnel what I learned at the event into my craft. Frankly, the excitement I feel about CSS following last week hasn’t been matched since those early days of learning it for the first time. That’s a sure sign to me of a home-run CSS Day.