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The continuing tragedy of CSS: thoughts from CSS Day 2023

I promised myself I wouldn’t attend any web conferences this year, yet here I am writing about CSS Day just two weeks before I speak at UX London.

Maybe I’m weak-willed, but when offered an opportunity, I try to say yes. Hopefully, I won’t regret saying yes to speaking at UX London. I certainly haven’t regretted saying yes to speaking at CSS Day eight years ago, not least because Peter-Paul and Krijn kindly offer me a badge for each subsequent edition.

The last time I took them up on this offer was in 2019. A lot has happened since.

In previous editions, talks focused on proposed features of CSS or ways to work around features that remained painfully absent. This year it felt like the complete opposite was true. Indeed, a common complaint heard in discussions during breaks was that there is now too much CSS.

Increased surface area

To take one example, the original CSS specification included 3 relative units for defining a length:

Including rarely used absolute units (in, cm, mm, pt and pc) and percentages, there was just under a handful of length units to remember.

Today there are 18 relative units for length (with pixel now considered an absolute measure), a six-fold increase. It’s a similar – albeit far more complicated – story for defining colour.

These raw numbers tell an underlying story; websites now appear in a number of different shapes, sizes and dimensions, and CSS needs to account for that.

It’s not only the fundamentals of CSS that have evolved. With new or expanded modules for layout, typography, animation, audio (though sadly not speech) and more, it’s possible to specialise in a subset of CSS. Yet when aspects of frontend development not involving JavaScript are seen as ignorable by employers, few will get this opportunity.

Google’s embrace

The growing surface area of CSS is countered by developers no longer needing to understand pre-processors or other tools. Sass served the community well, but as CSS slowly morphs into a (more evident) programming language, its days seem numbered. Having the browser do more of the heavy lifting has its benefits.

Yet it’s hard to shake the feeling (real or imagined) that CSS and other open standards are defined by an ever-narrowing group of implementors.

This year the conference was sponsored solely by Google (with 3 of the people on stage in its employ). This is a reflection, not only of the current economic climate, but the sheer dominance they hold within the world of web standards.

For all the whooping and hollering, I simply don’t trust Google. With Chrome came the embrace, with Blink the extensions (or ‘experiments’). The company tried very hard to complete the journey by extinguishing the open web with AMP.

Una opened the conference with a fast-paced overview of the state of CSS. Multiple slides showed support across the four major browsers: Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, yet this hid the fact that there are now only three rendering engines: Blink, Gecko and Webkit. It’s easy to celebrate adoption and compatibility with one less implementation to worry about.

Google’s developer advocates talk a good game about browser diversity, and point to contributions from Apple and Mozilla, yet these only serve as exceptions to the rule.

And yet. While Google dominates, CSS couldn’t be in ruder health. Even HTML is getting in on the act, with <selectmenu>, <dialog> and popover making common UI patterns easier to implement, the web hopefully a little more accessible as a result.

Like it or not, the web has always flourished under the direction of benevolent dictators, be that Tim Berners-Lee, Ian Hickson, or now the Chrome development team.

So too has it been a clash of western cultures. European post-war idealism created a framework for open collaboration among its scientists, who not only discovered the ‘God Particle’, but birthed an openly licensed technology for sharing information. American capitalist ideology and market-led innovation popularised and developed it to the point that the web has become an essential part of everyday life.

The continual push-pull between these competing ideas means the web keeps powering forward, forever pronounced dead, yet never more alive.

Food for thought

In closing her talk, Una shared this Oscar Wilde quote:

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

I feel seen. I’ve long advocated embracing the constraints of the platform; does CSS really need trigonometric functions? Yet one person’s creative constraints is another’s reason for ignoring CSS entirely. Perhaps that’s why JavaScript flourished while CSS was consigned to being a ‘toy language’.

CSS Day was once again a thought-provoking (sometimes head-exploding) event, with equally thoughtful organisation. And yes, the Bitterballen didn’t disappoint. But one CSS conference isn’t enough. This language is now so broad and deep, its implementation across browsers never more stable and complete, that opportunities to grow the community abound.

This community also needs to flourish to keep Silicon Valley’s giants in check; to prevent them from addressing their own theoretical needs and to keep them focused on helping developers serve user needs. For a web dictated by Google would be a real tragedy, whichever way you look at it.

Correction: Šime Vidas pointed out that there are in fact 36 relative length units in CSS now, not 18. 🤯
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