Articles in "general"

Fourteen talks, two days, one city. Color spaces, a browser built from scratch, CSS that runs x86 machine code, a select that took 33 years, and a masonry layout that is finally real. This was CSS Day 2026.

Maybe it's the amount of people from the UK that attended CSS Day this year, maybe I just wanted to use the word bollocks in an article, either way, It's my blog and I write what I want. I write on this thing called the web, which is for everyone and the web can be a really pretty place. Yep, in a world of AI making your half-baked design system we've all seen before, there is certainly a way we can do better. CSS Day showed me that the person orchestrating a Web UI will still triumph the "dude in garage with prompt machine" every time.

It’s not secret that I love a bit of beautiful UI. The web is full of creativity, experiences that we start to miss out from when using AI to look up everything. Finding information for a Metal festival and reading it in a sans-serif black/white screen is not engaging, you lose every bit of feeling, the urge to go jump in the mosh pit. I felt I had to at least try to take a look at ChatGPT apps. Is this the way forward? Some thoughts...

Sometimes you have this one of thing you are proud of, but you don't share it with the world. One of those thing is my color scheme that I use for my blog. I also started to use it in my IDE, and now you can too!

About half a year ago I wrote about the idea to have multi-handle range sliders as a native HTML element. I asked for feedback, and the community delivered. The proposal has moved forward since then, but it needs more voices to get browser vendors on board. Here's what happened, what changed, and what you can do. This article shows some of the survey results, and is a big call for help.

After sharing the redesign, a few people asked about the architecture underneath. How is the CSS organized? What's the token system? How does dark mode actually work? I had a few people asking to go more in depth, so I thought I'd show it a bit more about this CSS architecture. Cascade layers, a three-tier design token system, the light-dark() migration, a modern reset, container queries, logical properties everywhere, and the progressive enhancement philosophy tying it all together.

I talk about progressive enhancement a lot. Like, a lot. So when it came time to redesign my own site, I figured it was time to actually practice what I preach. What started as a typography fix turned into a full redesign powered by view transitions, corner-shape, @property, scroll-state queries, anchor positioning, and more. All progressively enhanced. All without a single polyfill.

An end-of-year reflection on 13 conference talks, book recommendations, struggles with AI noise, unfinished projects, personal growth, and a quick look at the exciting new CSS corner-shape property.

CSS Wrapped 2025 is out! We're entering a world where CSS can increasingly handle logic, state, and complex interactions once reserved for JavaScript. It's no longer just about styling documents, but about crafting dynamic, ergonomic, and robust applications with a native toolkit more powerful than ever. Here's an unpacking of the highlights and how they connect to the broader evolution of modern CSS.

People often ask me about Tailwind. I think Tailwind is great, but it isn't for me. This article is about the good stuff about Tailwind, the things you might be missing out on, and why modern CSS might be a better choice for pushing the web forward.

It's the end of November, holidays are getting closer, and I thought, why not make a list? In this article, I want to highlight a few CSS debugging features I'd love to see in Chrome DevTools in the upcoming year, some of which are new and others that are long overdue.

We need to talk about multi-handle range sliders… Really, we do. They’re one of those UI elements we see on a variety of web shops indicating price ranges; we see them for selecting time-slots; we see them for filtering between a variety of lenght units. Creating these experiences is more often inaccessible than just working, and even when I found the so-called perfect library, I’d still run into limitations for styling and expanding upon it. I thought that I should do something about this. I might be way over my head, and that is why I need your help...

A case study on how to build a guessing game with the prompt API. My game of Guess Who demonstrates how AI can be used to build thoughtful game logic, and the importance of prompt engineering to get the outcomes you expect.

As I begin this article on the train back from CSS Day 2025, I find myself physically and mentally exhausted, yet simultaneously, I feel a glow of joy and a sense of accomplishment. This time, I’m not rushing an article about every talk. This time, I'd like to share a story about my experience at CSS Day. This article is not your rushed tech article; it’s your Sunday read, it’s a story about a little man climbing a stage he thought he’d never climb. A truthful, emotional love letter to CSS Day and a reminder that you are allowed to have a bit of fun.

Sometimes you get inspired by a presentation or an article you’ve read. For me, an inspiration started at CSS Day last year during the opening keynote by Mathias Ott. One of those side projects I kept placing at the bottom of the pile, until I finally had had enough of it. I had to make it. In this article, I’d like to present a little tool, an OKLCH color picker. A tool created by me using CSS, a bit of React and a bit of AI help.

It’s been a few years since the Interop initiative was set in play. This has historically been one of the key elements in moving the web forward as it aims for a consistent web between browser vendors. In contrast to the “old days browser wars”, we as developers get streamlined features without having to check everything in every browser. The features of Interop 2025 are now known, features to be made stable across browsers by the end of the year. In this article, we’ll take a look at what we should get acquainted with in 2025.

Who publishes an article on the last day of the year? This guy! I felt like I should honor the tradition of at least recapping the past year by writing one final article in 2024. So this time, there will be no tutorials or hidden code gems. I already created my holiday CSS greeting card. This is just a little personal reflection and future plans for 2025.

As a GDE, I recently traveled to the Isle of Man. It’s probably not the first place you would think of when talking about conferences, meetups, and developer communities in general. You’ll probably think about motor races in narrow streets and beautiful hills. This event was once again an eye-opener for me to realize we should probably try to do more for smaller community groups whether that is government sponsorships, or just doing that - maybe literally - extra mile as a speaker.

The last few months have been crazy. I had a blast visiting conferences, speaking at meetups, and working on new things. But now it’s time to recharge some of those batteries and have some family time. In this article a little throwback of the last month or so and some of my holiday plans.

Another year, another CSS Day. I’m always happy to return to Amsterdam for this occasion, It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. So naturally, I’m happy that iO still allowed me to go there with my training budget, and the least I could do, is write a summary of this event on the tech_hub.