How do we move logical shorthands forward?
There are several proposals, but one major road block
We’re trying to make progress on shorthand syntax for CSS logical properties. But the path forward depends on where we hope to be a decade from now.
We’re re-building our website in the open, and writing about our process along the way. We hope you’ll follow along and even get involved!
It’s time for a major overhaul of the OddBird website, referred to internally as our OddSite. This will be more work than we can handle in one pass, so we’re going to take things slow and re-design our site in the open – sharing our thoughts while we work.
At OddBird, we are very familiar with open source collaboration, and daily client feedback, but designing a site in the open is new to us. Luckily, we’re not the first to do it. There’s a broad range of open design practices, so we’ll mix-and-match to see what works for us.
We decided to re-design our live site, rather than starting from scratch on a private staging server. That means we’ll be taking live traffic while we work, and using continuous integration to make updates on a regular basis. It also means we needed a usable first draft, so the site would work publically from day one. We’ll post more about that drafting process in the next week or two.
You’ll be able to see the site live as it develops, but we’ll also post articles along the way – capturing screen shots of the site at different stages, sharing artifacts from the design process (such as sketches and planning documents), and telling stories about our process and decision making. We also have our source code available on GitHub, and will talk about the open source tools we use, and share any tools we build.
These are the rough stages we expect to go through:
The steps can be listed like a numbered waterfall, but that’s not how it will happen in practice. The site goals will get broken down into distinct user stories, and each story will reflect a microcosm of the larger process. Changes to architecture will affect how we think about user stories, and “final” changes to design will affect the architecture. The process is flexible, and we can move around as we need to, but having a general order reminds us what is most important to focus on at each stage of the process.
The OddFriends Slack channel is no longer available. ↩︎
There are several proposals, but one major road block
We’re trying to make progress on shorthand syntax for CSS logical properties. But the path forward depends on where we hope to be a decade from now.
Can we get this process unstuck?
The CSS Working Group recently resolved to add a size
shorthand for setting both the width
and height
of an element. Many people asked about using it to set the ‘logical’ inline-size
and block-size
properties instead. But ‘logical shorthands’ have been stalled in the working group for years. Can we…
It’s not just a shorthand for anchor()
position-area
might be my favorite part of the CSS Anchor Positioning spec, with a ton of features packed in to make things just… work. But there’s no magic here, just a few key parts that work well.