Refactoring (the way we talk about) CSS

A presentation at Nordic.js in in Stockholm, Sweden by Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew has been writing CSS for 20 years, and teaching people the things she has learned for almost as long. Since the early days of CSS, and certainly since “CSS for Layout” became a thing, we’ve been teaching CSS in pretty much the same way. Here is a block thing, here is an inline thing, this is the Box Model … and here is this weird jumping through hoops that makes a layout. It’s time for a change.

In this talk Rachel will explain how, in the last few years, CSS has been refactored to an extent that to really explain how CSS works we need to change the way we teach and talk about the language. We need to look again at what it is to learn CSS. We need to leave our old ideas behind. It is only when we do, that we will stop supporting the idea that CSS is the fragile, broken, quirky language that its detractors would like to believe.

Video

Code

The following code examples from the presentation can be tried out live.