Uploaded May 2017 | Updated September 2026, 38 minutes ago
Thank you to Mozilla for making video recording possible.
We know the problems with CSS: It’s hard to maintain. It’s hard to scale. There’s no scope. The cascade is as indiscriminate as it is unrelenting. And we’ve been trying to fix it for the past 10 years, with SaSS, ITCSS, CSS Modules, and so on. These wonderful pre- and post- processors are tackling the unwelcome symptoms of CSS. So let’s get straight to the point — what would the Ideal Styling Language look like?
What does atomic design look like in our Ideal Styling Language? How do we style interactions, rather than visual aesthetics separate from animations? Will it be functional, or object-oriented? How much DOM information do we include? How do we select elements in the DOM when the DOM itself is changing? How do we do this in a performant manner?
Finally, how realistic would this Ideal Styling Language be to implement? If it’s not realistic, what does this Ideal Styling Language tell us about how we should be writing CSS now?
It’s going to be a fun, interesting, and enlightening thought exercise. Just wait and see.
Thank you to Mozilla for making video recording possible.
We know the problems with CSS: It’s hard to maintain. It’s hard to scale. There’s no scope. The cascade is as indiscriminate as it is unrelenting. And we’ve been trying to fix it for the past 10 years, with SaSS, ITCSS, CSS Modules, and so on. These wonderful pre- and post- processors are tackling the unwelcome symptoms of CSS. So let’s get straight to the point — what would the Ideal Styling Language look like?
What does atomic design look like in our Ideal Styling Language? How do we style interactions, rather than visual aesthetics separate from animations? Will it be functional, or object-oriented? How much DOM information do we include? How do we select elements in the DOM when the DOM itself is changing? How do we do this in a performant manner?
Finally, how realistic would this Ideal Styling Language be to implement? If it’s not realistic, what does this Ideal Styling Language tell us about how we should be writing CSS now?
It’s going to be a fun, interesting, and enlightening thought exercise. Just wait and see.
