Over at Environments for Humans, the 2nd Annual CSS Summit wrapped up in late July with an all-star line-up of CSS experts talking about the latest, greatest in CSS.
After a wonderful introduction by Dave Shea, author Denise Jacobs talked about troubleshooting CSS and set the stage for the day ahead.
With Web typography finally coming of age, Jason Cranford Teague covered where and what’s possible with today’s Web type.
These days the big news has been about CSS3.
Even though the specification is still being written, it’s what is in the browser that matters. And modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari are leading the pack with putting these new properties into place.
Zoe Gillenwater covered effective methods for how to bring in CSS3 into modern sites.
Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis talked about tools to create progressively enhanced sites, code that takes advantage of the new stuff without locking out users running older browsers.
David McFarland, author of so many missing manuals, focused on an in-depth on CSS3 animations. As one attendee noted, Dave could have easily buried the audience with the specification, but instead kept a light, jovial mood throughout a very balanced presentation.
Small and powerful devices in their own right, the iPhone and iPads also have mobile version of Apple’s Safari browser. Estelle Weyl showed us how to sprinkle in CSS3 to create iPhone-like Web apps.
While not directly tied to CSS3, Compass creator Chris Eppstein’s talk focused on how to code manageable CSS3. With so many browser vendor prefixes, it’s easy for our code to become an unwieldy mess. While Compass requires a local version of Ruby installed on your computer, it outputs static CSS files that are perfect for uploading any Web server solution.
At the end of the day, Nicole Sullivan went over Object-Oriented CSS– a topic she covered during our first CSS Summit. This time, though, she brought a real-world case study, Facebook. Which benefitted from her expertise in bringing the file size down of their CSS files, considerably.
All in all, for a CSS fan like myself it wasn’t a bad day.
I’m grateful for the speakers’ time from their busy schedules (for example, Stephanie had just returned from her honeymoon) and the attendees. Without you all, it wouldn’t be possible.
Note: If you missed the 2nd Annual CSS Summit, recordings are available for purchase through the event page.