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RFC: Initial CSS Level Categorization · CSS-Next/css-next · Discussion #92

A proposal to retroactively classify additions to CSS in order to put more meat on the bones of the term “modern CSS”.

An alternative proposal for CSS masonry | Blog | Chrome for Developers

Rachel responds to Jen’s recent post with the counter-argument; why masonry should be separate from grid.

I’m not entirely convinced. We heard performance issues as a reason why we could never have container queries or :has, but here we are. And the syntax for a separate masonry spec borrows so heavily from grid that it smells of redundancy.

Custom Element Naming | BitWorking

More thoughts on naming web components.

Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout | WebKit

This is a wonderful in-depth article by Jen, with lots of great demos.

She makes a very strong case for masonry layouts being part of the grid spec (I’m convinced!). If you have strong feelings one way or the other, get involved

Naming things needn’t be hard - Classnames

A handy resource from Paul:

Find inspiration for naming things – be that HTML classes, CSS properties or JavaScript functions – using these lists of useful words.

In new AI hype frenzy, tech is applying the label to everything now

Today’s AI promoters are trying to have it both ways: They insist that AI is crossing a profound boundary into untrodden territory with unfathomable risks. But they also define AI so broadly as to include almost any large-scale, statistically-driven computer program.

Under this definition, everything from the Google search engine to the iPhone’s face-recognition unlocking tool to the Facebook newsfeed algorithm is already “AI-driven” — and has been for years.

City of Women London

City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.

I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.

New principle: Do not design around third-party tools unless it actually breaks the Web · Issue #335 · w3ctag/design-principles

There’s a really interesting discussion here, kicked off by Lea, about balancing long-term standards with short-term pragmatism. Specifically, it’s about naming things.

Naming things is hard. Naming things in standards, doubly so.

Home · castastrophe/wc-theming-standards Wiki

I really like the idea of a shared convention for styling web components with custom properties—feels like BEM meets microformats.

What’s Happening? Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk - Bookforum Magazine

It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:

On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.

Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:

Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.

What’s in a name? | Sarah Higley

This is a terrific explanation of the concept of accessible names in HTML, written with verve and style!

Contrary to what you may think, naming an element involves neither a birth certificate nor the HTML name attribute. The name attribute is never directly exposed to the user, and is used only when submitting forms. Birth certificates have thus far been ignored by spec authors as a potential method for naming controls, but perhaps when web UI becomes sentient and self-propagating, we’ll need to revisit that.

Let’s Define CSS 4 · Issue #4770 · w3c/csswg-drafts

Jen kicked off a fascinating thread here:

It’s come up quite a few times recently that the world of people who make websites would greatly benefit from the CSS Working Group officially defining ”CSS 4”, and later “CSS 5“, etc.

The level is discourse is impressively smart and civil.

Personally, I don’t (yet) have an opinion on this either way, but I’ll be watching it unfold with keen interest.

Open UI

An interesting project that will research and document the language used across different design systems to name similar components.

The CSS Mindset | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

This post absolutely nails what’s special about CSS …and why supersmart programmers might have trouble wrapping their head around it:

Other programming languages often work in controlled environments, like servers. They expect certain conditions to be true at all times, and can therefore be understood as concrete instructions as to how a program should execute.

CSS on the other hand works in a place that can never be fully controlled, so it has to be flexible by default.

Max goes on to encapsulate years of valuable CSS learnings into some short and snappy pieces of advices:

Everything is a rectangle

The Cascade is your Friend

As much as necessary, as little as possible

Shorthands have long effects

Always Be Flexible

Context is Key

Content will change

Find Patterns and re-use them

Use consistent Names

No matter what your level of CSS knowledge, this post has something for you—highly recommended!

German Naming Convention

Don’t write fopen when you can write openFile. Write throwValidationError and not throwVE. Call that name function and not fct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.

JAMstack? More like SHAMstack. | CSS-Tricks

Chris makes the very good point that the J in JAMstack isn’t nearly as important as the static hosting part.

I also pointed out to Phil recently that the M (markup) is far more important than the J (JavaScript), which is there to enhance the M. So I suggested that the acronym be updated accordingly:

MAJstack!

This is my maj.

I think we often focus on designing or building an element, without researching the other elements it should connect to—without understanding the system it lives in.

What’s in a pattern name? — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan emphasises the importance of making a shared language the heart of any design system. I heartily agree!

This isn’t new thinking, mind: folks like Alla Kholmatova and Charlotte Jackson have been talking about this for ages. (And in doing so, they’ve massively influenced how I think about modular, pattern-driven design.)

Link tags: naming

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