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Modern CSS has evolved a lot — and not just to help you move faster. Many of the newest features are designed to help you write code that holds up better over time: less prone to breakage, easier to reason about, and more straightforward to hand off to others.

In this workshop, you’ll discover how modern CSS can help you solve everyday UI problems with less code, fewer workarounds, and a more streamlined workflow.

What Will Attendees Learn?

Participants will learn the theory, get some context, and then dive in to actually write code, so make sure to bring your laptop!

• Anchor positioning to create floating UI like tooltips and toggletips
• Easy to maintain customisable selects without complex libraries
• Native layers to make it easier to collaborate with others and your past self
• Positioning and layouts for pages and within components
• Native CSS nesting to write cleaner, more maintainable stylesheets without a preprocessor
• :has() — the parent selector that unlocks powerful new styling logic without extra markup
• Container Queries to make components truly responsive to their own context, not just the viewport
• View Transitions to add smooth, polished animations between states without reaching for JavaScript
• Scroll-driven animations to tie motion directly to scroll position, again without JavaScript
• @starting-style to animate elements in on first render, making entry transitions finally easy
• Subgrid to align nested elements precisely to a parent grid, no hacks required
• text-wrap for smarter, prettier line breaking in headings and body text
• CSS custom properties to create reusable, themeable values that cascade just like any other CSS property

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end of the day, you’ll have a solid grasp of the modern CSS features that make front-end development genuinely easier. A lot of what’s new in CSS has accessibility built in and hands off heavy lifting to the browser, so the interfaces you build will be more correct, more performant, and written with less code — code that’s easier to read, easier to hand off, and built to last. You’ll also leave with practical patterns for refactoring existing CSS into something more maintainable, whether you’re working in a growing codebase or trying to bring more consistency to a design system.

Who Is This Workshop For?

This workshop is for front-end developers, UI engineers and anyone who writes CSS regularly — whether you’re building components from scratch or maintaining a sprawling codebase that’s grown over years. You don’t need to be a CSS expert to attend, but you should be comfortable writing it day to day. If your team is dealing with specificity conflicts, hard-to-predict cascade behaviour, or just a lot of one-off solutions that are hard to maintain, this workshop will give you better tools to work with.

About Hidde de Vries

Hidde de Vries (@hdv) is a web standards and digital accessibility specialist (CPWA) for the Dutch government.

He is interested in making the web work for humans in the broadest sense of the word. Previously, he worked for Mozilla, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Sanity.

Hidde is a co-editor of WCAG and WCAG-EM, contributor to the Web Sustainability Guidelines and a member of the W3C’s Advisory Board.

His favourite programming language is CSS, his interest in AI is mostly in the philosophical aspects of it, and he believes there is still plenty of work to do to ensure the web is for everyone. Hidde writes about these things and more on hidde.blog. In his free time, he works on a coffee table book covering the video conferencing applications of our decade.

Time & Location

This full-day workshop will take place the day before SmashingConf. The workshop will be running from 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM on Monday, September 7.

Schedule for Monday, September 7

9:00 AM – Doors open, Registration
9:30 AM – Morning session begins
1:00 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – Afternoon session begins
3:30 PM – Coffee Break
5:00 PM – The End

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