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

Howdy—Robin Rendle here. I started this side project back in May because I wanted a dedicated place to learn-out-loud about all the exciting things that’s happening in the world of CSS.

And so many exciting things are happening!

Right now we’re living through a golden age: what was once a language that was easy to make fun of has 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:

Hints and Suggestions

Miriam Suzanne gave a fantastic talk the other day during 11ty’s International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good and I couldn’t possibly recommend it more. The highlight for me was when Miriam talks about the “CSS is awesome” meme:

This is the reason that the default overflow is visible: if we get cocky and make a box too small for our text, browsers will try to bail us out. Not because it’s the best looking solution but because the web will try to protect content whenever it can. Browsers are helping us out here.

So to me, this meme, this “CSS is awesome” box-breaking meme, it actually perfectly captures what is awesome about CSS and how much can go wrong when we try to control things that we shouldn’t necessarily control. When we add too many constraints at once.

I love that meme for the wrong reasons.

Miriam argues that this is a core part of CSS’s design but it’s also a political choice: to protect the content and protect the user we shouldn’t treat the CSS we write as a series of strict rules. Instead, we must think of them as hints and suggestions to the browser. Or, as Miriam says: guidance with a light touch.