The Cascade is a blog about the past, present, and future of CSS.

Howdy—Robin Rendle here.

We’re living through a golden age: CSS was once a language that was easy to make fun of but has now transformed into a serious and expressive toolkit for building visual interfaces. Although making fun of CSS was always lame, today, in 2024, it shows a deep lack of curiosity. The train has left the station. CSS rules. Get with the program.

But this didn’t happen randomly. Thousands of dedicated, smart folks have worked tirelessly over decades to get us to this point where CSS is—in this humble blogger’s opinion—the best design tool ever made. Every day some new super power is unlocked for us in browsers and with each new power the web becomes a better place, thanks to them.

So this blog exists to keep me in the loop and somewhat up to date with everything that’s possible with CSS but also it’s a reminder to celebrate the people doing the hard work building these tools for us.

You can subscribe to The Cascade via RSS, shoot me an email if you absolutely must, or follow the feed. This project is directly supported by readers and the membership program.

Right now the newsletter is taking a bit of a break whilst I figure out a healthy publishing cadence, but you can subscribe below:

Charm

Since I’ve been working as a designer for a few years now, I’ve felt like I needed to upgrade my command line chops. So I downloaded Warp and fell down a big rabbit hole of futzing and playing with everything I’d missed or ignored over the years.

This led me to Charm, a group of folks who make super interesting command line tools. They make stuff like VHS which helps you create GIFs of your terminal, or Pop that lets you send email via the command line. Bubbles is neat too, it’s a set of components for building your own CLI tools.

The one thing that I love about Charm is that they clearly spend an awful lot of time polishing their work. From the website to the README, everything is clear and everything shines with thoughtfulness. I especially loved this post about their process by Christian Rocha:

The README is critically important to the success of an open source product. It’s often a developer’s first point of contact with a project and the place where a developer will, in a matter of seconds, judge whether the project worthy of further consideration. With this in mind, put a lot of effort into README design, optimizing for strong first impressions.

Our strategy is to simply follow the age-old rule of advertising: showing the product. Good products, when presented correctly, will sell themselves, which is why we spend spend so much time on user experience and attention to detail.