Hello Reader,
It’s hard not to come back from an event like CSS Day and not be excited about the future of CSS, and the web in general.

There is a lot to be concerned about with the current state of things, but one thing that is super clear is that there are still a lot of super passionate people who love their craft, and seeing that passion, both in the talks from other speakers as well as when chatting with attendees, you can’t help but walk away from it motivated.

Now, some of the hallway track conversations did turn to worries about how things are changing, and it is the uncertainty of everything right now that is definitely the scary part. But even from people who are bummed out about being forced to use AI, there’s clearly a shift going on.

Companies are realizing that just throwing more tokens at problems doesn’t solve them, and they're now trying to figure out how to use these tools effectively, which is super encouraging.

Not everyone had that story, but I heard it from a fair number of people, especially those who worked at early-adopting companies.

With the impact of LLMs and AI agents, the web itself, and the way we create our websites and apps might not look the same as they used to, but if someone who was making websites a decade ago teleported to today, it wouldn’t look the same to them either.

The web itself has evolved a lot in its brief history, and it’s going to continue to evolve and change in the future. The worrying thing is the pace of change and the way some of it feels more forced than in the past, but as long as those of us who help make the web are passionate about what we’re doing, that passion will continue to shine through.

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week 📺 CSS Style queries in action ​ Now that container style queries are supported by all the browser engines, I took a quick look at some of the ways style queries are a bit like modifier classes, but with so much more power. ⚡ Adapting to dynamic content using modern CSS ​ This is one of my demos I used during my CSS Day talk, where I take a look at what the future of CSS might look like, using attr() with style queries. I recorded this before my talk, and did fix the typo I had in it before it made it on the big screen 😅. 🎙️Separation of concerns doesn’t work ​ After my talk at CSS Day, where I mentioned some people think CSS is overstepping it’s bounds, Jeremy Keith came to chat with me, saying he had the same conversation over 20 years ago about :hover, which people argued was a behavior-related feature, so it should be the domain of JavaScript. That got me thinking a bit about how the idea of separation of concerns, at least between HTML, CSS, and JS, is pretty flawed. There’s way too much fuzziness between the three, and I think there are better ways to think about it than what language does what.

🏁

I'm still catching up with things after being away for a bit, so no quiz or links this week. They should be back for next week, though.

Until then,
Kevin

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