Hints and Suggestions: The Design of Web Design

The web is fundamentally different from other platforms, built around a radical political vision for resilience, adaptability, and user control. With that vision under threat, the Cascade takes on an almost absurd task – styling unknown content, with unknown collaborators, on an infinite and unknowable canvas, across browsers, languages, writing modes, and device interfaces.

This is a dive into the origins of the web, and CSS in particular – the design constraints, the range of strange proposals, and how we got where we are. By the end, we have a better understanding of the cascade, and see the ‘CSS is Awesome’ meme in a new light.