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Hello Reader,
Last week on my second channel, I asked a question near the end of the video about whether or not people are worried that, thanks to more and more people using AI to write code, there would be less pressure on languages to evolve.
That led to a lot of interesting comments, with a bit of a split on people’s opinions. The two main arguments were:
- AI producing more and more code just builds up the training data on the current/older way of doing things
- It might push forward more, as training data isn’t fixed, and if it’s trained on newer/best practices, it will adopt faster than humans have
I can see things from both points of view, but the one issue I see with the second point is it involves things, like documentations, tutorials, etc. being made for the LLMs to digest, and I’m not sure that is going to happen.
The Open Web Docs, who do the writing for MDN, are already a small, underfunded outfit, and the people who write tutorials and educational content are less motivated than ever.
I went into more on this in my latest video on the second channel.
🙋♂️ What I’ve been up to this week
Other than that, I have kept up with my educational content, and I do have no plans to stop 😅.
📺 The future of CSS looks very different
 Apparently, people don’t like change very much! In the comments on this one, there was a lot of pushback on CSS using functions and if statements like I looked at in this video.
The thing is, so much of this is stuff that you’d write once, and then just use. It looks different, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad… and of course, just because a feature exists doesn’t mean it has to be used!
I can see custom functions being used a lot in large-scale projects, as they offer an easier way to pass tokens through, with the added benefit of type safety compared to custom props, which leads to easier debugging. You can define the syntax on those too, but registering all your custom properties can be a little much.
⚡ Positioning in CSS is too easy now
 A quick look at how anchor positioning makes things comically easy, including the handy anchor-size() that we don’t often hear about.
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🔗 Other awesome stuff from around the web
- I Could’ve Rickrolled the Entire FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID. You’d think a company the size of FIFA would do more than just client-side auth, but apparently not. I’m a CSS guy, and even I know this 🫠.
- Your Grid Lanes will likely fail WCAG 2.4.3 by Manuel Matuzović (Rachel Andrew talked about how
reading-flow should be prioritized over masonry/grid-lanes two years ago at CSS Day and she’s very right. It’s borderline useless without it.
- Honestly not sure what to think about 60% of internet traffic being bots… wish that they had more historical data to look at, but going into the 12-month view does show overall traffic trends going up quite drastically, which you have to assume is from bots.
- In non-web-related news, Mainframe Studios is remastering ReBoot and putting the episodes on YouTube. This was one of my favourite shows back in the day, so I am pretty excited about this 😅.
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📝 Quiz time!
When using anchor positioning, how can we have an element match the width of the element it is anchored to?
width: anchor(anchor-size);width: anchor-size(size);width: anchor(width);width: anchor-size(width);
As per usual, you'll have to head on over to YouTube to take a stab at the quiz, and once you answer, you'll see if you were right or not.
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🏁
I sent out a dedicated email about this earlier this week, but just in case you missed it, I’m teaming up with Michael Warren to create a new course about design systems. If you’d like, click this link and I’ll update your email preferences so that you get updates and lesson previews.
Have a fantastic week!
Kevin
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