The style of the web
I still remember the first websites that appeared on the Internet. When the amazement of having all the world connected through a single computer network passed, we realized we were facing websites made of clunky boxes of text.
Then the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) appeared as a way to style these contents, to present them in an appealing way. It would allow to modify presentation without having to re-code your whole site again.
This bold promise quickly caught my attention – having the right presentation and easy-to-modify code would be even more important than I initially thought – and some of the first web-related books I read almost two decades ago were specialized on this subject. Since then, CSS has been a key piece to build my web-based interfaces.
Of course, presentation and content were still so entangled in those mazes of tables that adjusting the design using just stylesheets wasn’t always possible. But we’ve come a long way since those days, and what CSS promised is now becoming a reality.
The beauty of modern CSS
I’ve seen my CSS code evolving from table-based designs to mobile-first responsive designs.
When developing a modern HTML website, it should ideally go with minified, fast-loading, mobile-first CSS approaches that encapsulate all the presentation features for all resolutions and screen sizes. And all that is finally becoming possible.
Cross-browser compatibility is still one of the essential points. Fortunately, handling the development carefully, most of the CSS rules will behave the same way in most modern browsers. And for the cases where this weren’t possible, the conflicting browsers could be especifically adressed with browser conditional code. So everything feels now under control.
It’s a pleasure to see how CSS3 has been empowered beyond basic presentation features, being now capable of carrying out advanced animations in an efficient way. It is an essential part of creating a web experience that follows material design principles, while keeping maximum compatibility.
Modern CSS is also a key element in creating responsive websites that will adapt themselves to the screen size of any device. A carefully designed responsive experience should perfectly work with any possible screen size, thus making our site not only easy to use, but future-proof.
In my most recent projects, SASS has always been present. After all, using SASS speeds up the workflow, makes the CSS files more organized than ever, and keeps code re-usable and easy to modify.
We live interesting times. Working with CSS has neven been so enjoyable as it is now.
Do you need fast-loading responsive cross-browser-compatible code with a flawless presentation? Then contact me to take care of the CSS of your project.