Web Directions hover 2021

From risky and may never be in your browser, to stable and just released yesterday; follow Adam as he strolls through proposals, specs and supporting tools for all the this new CSS hotness.

Over the last decade Object-Oriented & Responsive design have become the norm – with tools like Flexbox, Grid, intrinsic sizing, and aspect-ratio giving us even more layout control. CSS has always been designed for a responsive web, but that goalpost can shift over time. Now several new CSS proposals like Container Queries, Cascade Layers, Scoped Styles, and Nesting are all aimed at improving the way we write responsive components and design systems.

It’s been six years since Christopher Chedeau’s seminal yet infamous talk on CSS-in-JS. The community has come a long way since then but the experimentation hasn’t stopped. In this talk we’ll look at the current state of CSS-in-JS and examine the trends that are driving the space forwards.

Have you needed to maintain an aspect ratio in a layout? Perhaps 16:9 for a video or a 4:3 photograph. Was it more work than you would have thought? There’s JavaScript solutions or the Padding-Top hack that work, but there are sacrifices to these workarounds.

The frustration of maintaining a consistent width-height ratio is about to be solved with modern browsers supporting the CSS Aspect Ratio property. In this talk we look at what aspect ratio is, how we can use it in our code and the problems it’ll solve.

CSS Variables is still a bit of a buzz word. Many of us have googled it, looked at some examples, maybe even done a tutorial, but how many of us have used CSS Variables in production?

I want to show you how and why we used CSS Variables in production in the new deployments view in Jira. More importantly I want to show you how to spot a potential use case for CSS Variables so you're ready for it when it's staring you in the face! Oh, and our use case is not dark mode or theming!

Over the years, there has been a lot of effort in getting typography on the web right. With the advent of variable fonts, we're already witnessing how it improves the experience and even web performance.

We'll explore how adding modern CSS capabilities such as layout grids and custom properties in the mix truly gives us superpowers to create practical dynamic type systems that are accessible, performant and works across various screen dimensions.

CSS Layout is all about boxes. We know that some boxes are blocks, and others are inline, and we can change the display type of elements by changing the value of the display property. That property holds the key to much more than this, however. It is the foundation on which all layout is built; the core of the inbuilt CSS layout system. Learning Grid Layout, or Flexbox, without understanding Display, leaves you with a wobbly foundation and more questions than answers.

The real question isn’t “Should I use Grid or Flexbox?” but instead, “How do I want these boxes to behave?” Understanding the interaction between layout methods will enable you to easily create fallbacks for older browsers, and be able to make more informed decisions when deciding how to build any part of your design, big or small.

Let's face it: you hate CSS, and it seems to hate you too. But what if this was not caused by the quirks of the language, but the very structure of our brains?

In this talk, I'll dive into how the process of “thinking” works differently among individuals, how the Multiple Intelligences Theory can explain why CSS seems alien to both designers and developers, and what can we do to make it "click" in place

Most of us developers used to think in terms of left and right, top and bottom. This is because, in the early days of the internet, it was meant mostly for uploading documents, and not for the complex website structures we know today.

This is the reason that no one considered the needs of multiple language websites.

But now the new logical properties give us a lot more power to control our websites, no matter which type of language we are using, for example, English, Arabic, Japanese, etc.). All this with minimal styles changing.

Responsive design turned 10 years old last year. Since then browser capabilities have changed a lot, and they're set to change even more. We'll explore new and upcoming media queries that will let website authors make websites that respond not just to screen sizes, but to many different user preferences and situations. Learn how to implement these in forward compatible ways with practical tips and examples.

In this talk, Ahmad will dive into the details of CSS comparison functions by explaining how they work, where and why to use them. More importantly, he will explain how you can use them today with a proper fallback for non-supporting browsers.

Have you ever wondered how a browser makes sense of CSS properties and values?

Turns out by parsing strings. Everything is a string: 50%, string. 2px, string. 0.5, string. #FFF, string.

So what happens when the browser can't work out what the string is? Such as "width: 24asd;"

It fails silently, warning us with the generic "invalid property value" message. But what if we could assign types to the values? So the browser knew what it was expecting and what was wrong with the value we entered.

This is where the CSS Typed Object Model comes in. It sits under the umbrella of the CSS Houdini API's and assign types to CSS values. So the browser knows it's expecting a number, colour or keyword. This allows for more control over attributes and for more useful errors.

In this talk I'm going to take you through the CSS Typed OM and examples of how we can start using and benefiting from TypedCSS.

In this presentation, Michal Porag, frontend developer at Outbrain, looks at an amazing, inspirational CSS art and we learn how to look at a non-conditional shapes and recreate them with pure CSS tools.

Heydon Pickering's Webbed Briefs are brief videos about the web, its technologies, and how to make the most of them. They’re packed with information, fun times(TM), and actual goats. Yes, it’s a vlog, but it isn’t on Youtube.

For the very first Hover conference, Hayden is making a very special Webbed Briefs.