The Future of CSS: Creator's Perspective

Håkon Wium Lie is the brilliant mind that created CSS back in 1994. Since then, the CSS landscape has undergone significant transformations. As the user base has expanded, the process of implementing changes has become increasingly challenging. In this short video, you'll learn Håkon's view on the changing landscape of CSS as well as its future.

00:00-00:48 Changing landscape of CSS
00:48-02:45 Perspective on the future

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[alishapayne]

"Take care of the code, be gentle to the computer and make beautiful stuff on your screens" what a quote from the

[DejayClayton]

My opinion is that CSS was designed to be too abstract, just like HTML was. I remember asking Håkon, a decade ago, why CSS didn't allow for per-browser style rules. His was response was basically, "CSS design shouldn't care about the particular user agent." As a result, CSS became flooded with a metric ton of styling hacks that were designed to target specific browsers anyway, but in a fashion that was extremely hacky, hard to reason about, and brittle enough to break whenever a browser was updated. Great foresight! And it didn't help that browsers initially didn't even have ACID tests. At any event, I still think that CSS should allow for a "browser capabilities" mechanism, similar to "termcap" for TTYs, to allow rendering to be specified as appropriate for the capabilities of the user agents. It's time to kill the need for CSS browser hacks.

[OfficialStickPM]

short code like css-reference to reduce amount of context in style sheets over 100k lines to be reduced by half the size. that's the only future we have in a desired format.

[lisamith]

I can still get the data of the Gutenberg bible, but I can't get information from it. The language and the lettering has changed so much that I can't read it anymore. On the other hand, historians can still read it. Maybe there will be code historians in the future...

[MrDoodleDandy]

"Creator of CSS", I don't think a lot of people understand that Bert Bos is like the Wozniak of CSS

[alsaamit]

The hard part of CSS is to guess and give a name to your Class 😄

[siyaram]

CSS should Die.

In 90s it made sense, as everyone was coding the visuals, but it is moronic to code visuals in 2023

We had hypercard, we should have built the web around that model than the stupid markdowns and styling path we choose