This week I went to the CSS day conference.

It had been 5 years since I had joined CSS day (with no editions in 2020 & 2021), and I was glad to once again visit Amsterdam for an excellently organized two days of talks about CSS.

The conference kicked off with Una Kravets from the Google developer relations team talking about all the new features in CSS. There’s been a lot of evolution over the past few years. If you remember, 2015 was kind of a “banner year” for CSS with a lot going on in terms of grid and flexbox. The last few years there’s been an interesting dynamic, where browser vendors have come together to work on features in an interoperable fashion.

Throughout the conference there were many talks about new features, including container queries, scroll-driven animations, trigonometry functions, new color spaces… as well as the results of some of the efforts of the Open UI working group like selectmenu (a customizable select) and the popover element.

I took a lot of notes in the container queries talk, and during Bramus‘s talk section about scroll-driven animations I could not help myself to make a codepen to try out the newest features (warning: Chrome Canary with the right feature flags only). I am especially excited about container queries landing in browsers. For me that’s been the missing part of responsive web design.

A conference is not only about the talks of course, and I was happy to meet some new people, talk to some old CSS friends. Where else can you discuss selector complexity and the need for abstractions like CSS modules and have the other side of the table understand what you are saying?

I especially want to thank the organisers Krijn and PPK, and the team behind the conference. It could not have been smoother and better organized. Props to them.