A day for CSS
Last week I went to a conference that was rather unique, it only covered CSS technologies. Eight speakers, eight modules for a one time only event. I think they could do another one, maybe not next year but certainly the year after that. There is more than enough topics/modules to fill a few conferences. In any case CSSDay was a fascinating conference and revealed some tension within the CSS working group. CSS is evolving at a brisk pace at the moment and I can imagine that some toes are likely to get trampled on.
Great new heights
One thing everybody agrees on is that CSS is evolving because nothing else came to replace or augment it. It fact CSS was never supposed to do the things it does now. The seemingly late to party additions of media queries and flexible boxes actually reveal the problem of extending a technology that was never intended to deal with layout directly. Adding layout technology, along with animation, 3D rendering and hardware focussed API’s is moving CSS away from it’s original declarative nature by become more computational, more functional. CSS is becoming the most complex technology on the web trident (HTML, JavaScript and CSS) by adding more behavioural and structural properties as well as extending it’s visual capabilities. This could pose problems in creating interfaces in the future, because the bar is being set higher and higher. I can see wysiwyg editors making a comeback because where CSS is heading some may not be able to follow. For me this is, ever since the CSSZenGarden, the revolution I’ve been waiting for.