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.

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

Design Token to CSS

The other day I mentioned Saneef Ansari’s excellent postcss-design-token-utils that converts a bunch of JSON into custom CSS properties and utility classes. At the end I aggressively rambled about how much I’d love to see this as a dedicated website and, well, Saneef built the darn thing!

It’s called Design Token to CSS and it’s very much worth checking out. I’ve fallen out of the loop a little bit when it comes to syncing design tokens like this between Figma and your front-end codebase but I imagine this is extremely helpful for keeping designers and engineers on the same page there.

Also! This tool is part of Saneef’s collection of “nano-sized tools for web designers” called nanools which I had never seen before but holy heck is color × color worth looking at as well. It lets you build full blown color systems—but I especially love how Saneef goes about explaining luminance, chroma, and hue.