CSS and Momentum

I reckon 2021 was the best year for CSS since…2015? I haven’t felt this level of excitement and momentum in years.

In the last twelve months container queries and the :has pseudo selector went from a pipe dream to almost-shipping in browsers. My hunch is that these two (along with subgrid) will reshape the way we work as front-end developers in 2022 and will make possible a whole new range of things that aren’t even imaginable today.

Although, the truth here is that CSS doesn’t get better one year, randomly, because people start focusing on it again. Instead it’s the dedicated work of years by the Firefox, Chrome, and Safari teams, as well as everyone that’s part of the working groups who isn’t affiliated with browsers. It’s thanks to the developers, speakers, writers, and contributors across the web that we now have these superpowers.

Anyway, I’m truly excited to see how it’ll all improve in 2022, as Bramus writes about the near-term future of CSS:

I’m quite confident the following features will see support across all browsers sometime in 2022. Some features already have support in one or more browsers, with others to follow. Learning one of the following CSS features listed below in 2022 will pay off.

Bramus’s list is so exciting that I reckon this is the best time to get started in web design since 2008 when CSS3 emerged and pushed everything forwards in one giant great leap.