Notes on the DTO sponsored presentation from Bert Bos Feb 2016 (co-creator of CSS)
Why Standards & the future of CSS - Bert's slides

Why standards

No vendor lock in
Stability

I should have asked about W3C vs WHATWG

I would be interested to hear more about the interplay between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). The way I see it WHATWG moves a bit faster that W3C and is driven bit more by those wanting to implement and address developing needs earlier.

Interesting also that mailing lists remain the primary comms. tools for these orgs.

Sidenote - What is WHATWG

The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a growing community of people interested in evolving the Web. It focuses primarily on the development of HTML and APIs needed for Web applications.

The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors. So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born.

Front end web = Open Web Platform (OWP)

interactive
cross-platform
same APIs for browser (cloud) based and locally installed applications

Good web design

Make it readable without CSS, JS, Cookies [interesting – assuming that the primary use of web is still text]
Keep the CSS small (in Bert’s experience 10KB should be enough for a complex style)
Design for the small screen, but don’t waste space on a big one
Apply WCAG
If a page has a big navigation menu, either:
Put it at the end of the source
Put a ‘skip to content’ link
Use media queries
Don’t set max width on body
Don’t use fixed width or font size
Don’t minify – let other people read and ‘steal’ your ideas
Use shorthand properties – easier for code maintenance

CSS – What things are in the pipeline

Catering for round displays (like watch faces) – positioning with polar coordinates (angle+distance)
Dealing with challenge of visual vs logical order and navigation. As someone who works on designing and testing for multiple modes of use this continues to be a tricky one.

Aside ~ Providing a predictable but not necessarily uniform experience across modes of use is tricky. For example a user with display and mouse/keyboard, vs. a user with a visual disability still using some of the display and a keyboard only, vs. a user with a visual disability still using some of the display and a keyboard and a screen reader, vs. a screen reader and keyboard only etc. It is heartening that the designers of the standard are grappling with this.

Page display of documents

Catering for

Paginated/scrolling modes of use
Mixed scrolling and paginated methods or a flip button
HTML to PDF formatting
*Many vendors do book layout with HTML and convert to PDF e.g. Prince from Melbourne

Building in features for paginated display

          * page numbers
          * table of contents
          * footnotes
          * (good) page breaks
          * proper typographical support

Low level APIs Houdini access – to let advanced JavaScript users access the internals of browser engines

To improve things like scrolling behaviour, line breaking and justification, math layout
Here is a rough guide to the steps of code compiling to pixel painting in your browser

Document Object Model (DOM) – Tree
Painting and compositing – access here would allow some colour changes to be made
Font metrics – access here would please typography nerds
States (events)
Scrolling
Parsing, cascading, and inheritance
Page loaded and displayed in browser. – Tip using the JS event listener on document.onload is not always a great choice as it only happens after everything else here.

*Also thinking about adding a generic property to CSS like the data element in HTML

Questions from attendees

Frameworks like Twitter boostrap hot or not

Not a fan but depends on use
You get responsive design and fallbacks but big and bloated codebase
Try building an understanding of CSS fundamentals before using a framework

Preprocessors like SASS or LESS hot or not

Likes the idea but not always the implementation
Good that people can pick up and take what they want
Universally useful stuff like variables might be good to bring into the CSS standard

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Why Standards & the Future of CSS