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:

Three Layers of UI Interaction

Drew Powers wrote about how to polish UI and described this process as the 3 layers of UI interaction:

  1. Render area: where does this element appear?
  2. Hit area: what is the shape/size/placement of the invisible interactive area?
  3. Focus area: when Tab-ing, what is the focus ring shape/placement?

What happens when you don’t care for these things? Well, I reckon everything about a UI then feels uncertain and we tend to navigate around with a real lack of confidence. But there’s been many times where I’ve forgotten about that third one!