Last month I was at DevDay in Mons, Belgium. One of the talks I gave covered all the recent and new stuff that’s coming to CSS.

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# The Talk

The talk I gave is a full-length talk of 45 minutes in the main room.

Things have been going hard for CSS the past few years, with many new features landing across browsers at a very fast pace.

With this talk you’ll be up to speed on some of the recent additions to CSS and how they allow you to write cleaner, clearer, and more maintainable CSS. They might even allow you to remove some nasty CSS hacks or JS-based solutions that you’re currently relying on.

And oh, time permitting we’ll also take a look into the future at what’s to come next …

Because this talk gives you a rundown of all the new niceties, it hops around from topic to topic. Covered topics were:

• Intro: It’s an exciting but also confusing time to be a frontend developer
  • Interop 2023
  • Monthly New to the Web Platform posts on web.dev
• Established Additions:
  • Custom Properties
  • Space-Separated Color Notation
  • aspect-ratio
  • Logical Properties and Values
  • Smooth Scrolling
  • Scroll Snapping
  • accent-color
• New/Upcoming Additions:
  • Individual Transform Properties
  • :focus-visible
  • (Size) Container Queries
  • CSS Nesting
  • :has()
  • Color Functions
  • Color Spaces
  • New Viewport Units
  • Cascade Layers
  • Subgrid
  • Media Query Ranges
  • @property
  • View Transitions

Yes, you see that correctly: the talk also covers Custom Properties, an almost decade old feature of CSS. It always surprises me how few people have heard of them, use them, or why they are better than preprocessor variable which are nothing but static tokens. For those reasons, and because many demos rely on them, I include it in my talk as the first topic. It also forms a nice link to @property – covered later in the talk – which gives them their superpowers.

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# Slides

The slides of my talk are up on slidr.io are embedded below:

<a href="https://slidr.io/bramus/what-s-new-in-css-2023-03-23-devday#1" title="What’s new in CSS (2023.03.23 @ DevDay)"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://www.bram.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/whats-new-in-css-devday.jpg" alt="" width="560" height="315" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-33390" srcset="https://www.bram.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/whats-new-in-css-devday.jpg 1920w, https://www.bram.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/whats-new-in-css-devday-560x315.jpg 560w, https://www.bram.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/whats-new-in-css-devday-1120x630.jpg 1120w, https://www.bram.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/whats-new-in-css-devday-768x432.jpg 768w, https://www.bram.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/whats-new-in-css-devday-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://www.bram.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/whats-new-in-css-devday-1568x882.jpg 1568w" sizes="(max-width: 560px) 100vw, 560px" /></a>

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# Thanks!

Even though the conference is local to Belgium, I hadn’t heard of it before. I found the conference to be well organized and the schedule to be well balanced (after us speakers asked to not have overlapping sessions, which the organizers agreed to).

Thanks to the organizers for having me and thanks to the attendees for being there. Hopefully you all had fun attending my talk — I know I had making it (and whilst bringing it forward) — and perhaps you even learned something from it along the way 🙂

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💁‍♂️ If you are a conference or meetup organiser, don't hesitate to contact me to come speak at your event.