My year in CSS

Published on:

December 31, 2023

Categories:

CSS⁴⁰, Personal¹⁰

Current music:

tricot — Laststep (Acoustic)

Current drink:

Lapsang Souchong tea

2023 was very productive for me in terms of experimenting with CSS and writing about it. I guess, escaping from reality by submerging yourself into your special interest can have positive results occasionally.

Today, I will list almost everything I published about CSS this year, and write a bit of context about some of it.

• “Future CSS: Anchor Positioning”

  March 15. Exploring anchor positioning was the thing that started it all. I began experimenting with it as soon as I saw its first prototypes in Chrome Canary, and spent a few months working on this article, coming up with examples, thinking about which issues to open in CSSWG, and so on.

• “Future CSS: Wishes Granted by Scroll-driven Animations”

  May 30. Another thing that I started experimenting with — scroll-driven animations. Curiously, I did not initially think that I write anything about them. I don’t really do promo sites these days, and, at first glance, this feature seemed like it was only useful for various long scrollable pages with elements flying everywhere. How was I mistaken! Scroll-driven animations ended up being powerful: allowing us to query elements’ positions and dimensions.

• “Cyclic Dependency Space Toggles”

  June 14. Going back from CSS Day on a train, I was playing with some workarounds for the container style queries when I stumbled upon what ended up being this technique. I think it is very neat!

• “Fit-to-Width Text”

  June 21. I think my brain was on fire after CSS Day. Thinking a lot about scroll-driven animations, one day I just woke up with this idea — and wrote a post in one day. Based on the engagement in Mastodon (the only way I can track things now that I have removed any analytics from my website), it is the most popular thing I came up with this year. I have something in the works related to it, so stay tuned!

• “Position-Driven Styles”

  June 28. A continuation of my experiments with scroll-driven animations, exploring the whole position aspect of them. Many things I did explore in this article I consider foundational, and I’m planning to write at least one other similarly foundational article about a similar concept.

• “Scroll-Driven State Transfer”

  October 16. Yet another article about scroll-driven animations, this time about a smaller technique. A bit more hacky than some other things I did explore, but still rather useful as a concept (and as a thing that can be applied to other similar cases like anchor positioning in the future).

• “The Shrinkwrap Problem: Possible Future Solutions”

  December 7. My second article about anchor positioning — about how it works with inline elements. This article was maybe a bit too long in the works — among many other drafts of various experiments. The technique from this article solves an issue that is impossible to solve otherwise. Which is neat, but also makes it harder to wait for the anchor positioning.

• “Igalia Chats: The Power of CSS”

  November 13. Brian Kardell and Eric Meyer invited me to chat with them. My first podcast in English, I was very nervous! But I always enjoy talking about CSS and was happy that there are others I can share my love with.

• “Anchor Positioning”

  December 14. Stephanie Eckles did accept my submission for her “12 Days of Web” advent calendar. It was a challenging topic — due to anchor positioning specs not even being finalized yet, I had to think about how I wanted to approach an “overview” article like that. I hope the result was ok! This was also the first time I wrote for anywhere besides my website, I think.

• “A Peek Into the CSS Lab”

  December 14. Yes, on the same day! I was invited by Christian Schaefer to give a small talk, and I chose to show some of my older experiments and some of my not yet finished ones. As it goes, I did mention many other resources during this talk — I’m still gathering the links to them, and I’m planning to post a list of them in the following weeks.

I did omit all the posts from this blog, but you can see them all by visiting “CSS” tag page. Maybe you missed some of these posts!

Other than blog posts and articles, I created numerous issues in various browser bug trackers, participated in CSSWG discussions (and was invited by Elika J. Etemad to virtually attend a session dedicated to anchor positioning at TPAC), and submitted a number of my first Web Platform Tests.

I think it could be cool to list all of these here as well, but it is a lot! Maybe one day I will gather all of my external contributions, like from the above list, and link to them in one way or another.

I want to thank everyone who spoke with me in Mastodon, be it about CSS or not. Many people did invite me to do one thing or another, which is not something I’m used to, and I’m truly thankful.

I don’t know what the next year will bring, and the only thing I wish for everyone is peace and love. See you in 2024.