Cascade Solves Styling By Maarten Van Hoof

To some, CSS is the most beautiful language they have ever written. Like a gentle stream, flowing over your markup and letting it burst into invigorating, saturated life. To others, CSS is the bane of their existence. An impossible game of whack-a-mole where changing one thing inevitably leads to unwanted side effects on totally unrelated places. Failing not to sound cliché, with great power comes great responsibility. Understandably, something that those with little to no affiliation with CSS are not eager to take. At its basis, the Cascade, the C in CSS, together with specificity and inheritance, enables a very powerful system for styling the web. But it has become kind of the odd one out this last decade. We've seen the rise of conventions and frameworks that try to abstract away the complexity of authoring or work around the constraints that CSS laid upon us. But things have changed. Browser vendors are now working together for better styling cross-compatibility and CSS governance, and there are all sorts of amazing new features planned and already added to the CSS language in the last 2 years. With the advent of the Golden Era of CSS & Web UI, we have the unique opportunity to rethink how we should author CSS. I'm here to share with you where we, Web Artisans, have been, where we are and where we might be heading in terms of CSS architectures. MAARTEN VAN HOOF If I say 'Use', you say 'the Platform' ! Together with his fellow front end developers, Maarten raises iO's HTML, JavaScript and CSS bar to a whole new level. With tools such as Vue.js, Nuxt.js and OpenAPI and many others in his proverbial tool belt, he builds modern web projects that excel in speed and usability. Next to grinding keys, he's also a passionate tattler about how Open Source software should get more recognition, as it is the cornerstone of our current-day digital society.