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…
- A Mind at Play: The Brilliant Life of Claude Shannon, Inventor of the Information Age by Jimmy Sonni and Rob Goodman
- The Web Is Agreement by Paul Downey
- CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild
- What is a good standard? An essay on W3C’s design principles by Bert Bos
- Design Principles
- Tweet by Miriam Suzanne
- Open UI
Blog posts
- The Languages Which Almost Became CSS by Zack Bloom
- A Look Back at the History of CSS by Jay Hoffmann
Presentations
- On the origin of cascades by Hidde de Vries
- CSS Reset by Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie
Proposals (email)
- Request for Comments: STYLESHEETS by Rob Raisch, June 1993
- Stylesheet Language by Pei Wei, October 1993
- Cascading HTML style sheets — a proposal by Håkon Wium Lie, October 1994
Papers (PDF)
- A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon, 1948
- Cascading Style Sheets by Håkon Wium Lie, 2006