rachelandrew

The CSS Working Group uses GitHub primarily, and any minutes from IRC are added to the issue. Here: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues

You are very welcome to contribute!

Things don't get a lot of eyeballs on them on w3.org which defeats the object of the post which is to get developer feedback. It's pretty normal for CSSWG members to ask for opinions via tweets, on their own blogs, or in other places. I've posted stuff to my personal blog in the past. This is something that will be worked on in the CSS Working Group, it happens to have people from Chrome working on it, however it will be discussed with the rest of the CSSWG who have a range of affiliations: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/members.en.php3

Grid has alignment: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/css/cheatsheets/box-alignment

Grid also implements Box Alignment, just like flexbox. You can align the item inside the grid area.

https://rachelandrew.co.uk/css/cheatsheets/box-alignment

The latest version of autoprefixer has the old grid support off by default, I'm not sure of a scenario in which it would be useful to be honest. The spec in IE10,11 and Edge is solid, it just is more limited than the updated spec.

That's the code from the example I linked, you can find it here along with details https://gridbyexample.com/patterns/header-asmany-span-footer...

That site is where I keep all by grid demos including a whole series of tutorial videos explaining the spec.

That wouldn't work because it would rely on markup although display: table is pretty handy as a fallback for small UI elements in particular.

The grid (and flexbox) specifications define how fallbacks should work, making it pretty straightforward to create good - not identical (because what would be the point?) experiences for the browsers you need to support.

So, for example with display: table which generates anonymous boxes, the spec defines that box generation won't happen.

I detailed a bunch of this stuff here: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/css/cheatsheets/grid-fallbacks

My daughter turns 20 this year. I learned Perl as a young, soon to be single, mother. I had no computer science background, I just wanted to learn to do more than the basic HTML I had already taught myself. That learning gave me a career.

I've only ever done this with a child to take care of, and I've done it by simply working every possible moment I could, and being organised and focused with my time. However being able to provide for her, made that worthwhile. I started my own business when she was still only at school half days, and we talked about work, and why I needed to work, and that work was where money came from. The money to eat, have a home, and do nice things together.

I count myself lucky that I get to do things I enjoy. However it is amazing what can be achieved with hard work and focus, and a purpose.

I wrote up an explanation here: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/03/30/should-i-use-...

It's built using my other product Perch Runway, using our Shop add-on :) took me about half a day to put together as Shop deals with membership stuff by default.

https://grabaperch.com https://shop.perchcms.com

I put my CSS Layout knowledge into an online course at:

https://thecssworkshop.com/

Interestingly it has been very popular with teams (so selling a set of licenses so a whole team of developers can use the material). I also teach the same material in person (either in-house or in open workshops) so I'm keeping the two in sync. I made some notes about that process on my blog: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/06/03/creating-an-e...

I intend to do a bit more marketing of both the in-person and online training in the new year.

As an independent (not working for a browser vendor) invited expert to the CSS Working Group, training and offering this course is really how I can fund doing that.

Creating HTML and CSS with the aid of a time machine would be far easier. The problem with HTML and CSS is that we can't break the web, and much of HTML and CSS comes from a time where the kind of things we want to do now couldn't really be imagined.

Here is a list of mistakes the CSS Working Group would like to change, if we could go back in time to do so https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes

I would really encourage anyone who thinks the web platform as it stands is sucky to get involved in trying to make it better. There are lots of interesting things happening - a lot of them behind browser flags.

Also, take a look at Houdini - the project to open up the APIs and let you extend CSS itself. There is an explanation of the project here https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/03/houdini-maybe-the-m...

It is also worth remembering that flexbox was never designed for complete layouts. It's designed for one-dimensional layout. UI elements such as forms fields, navigation, sets of "card" etc. You run into a whole bunch of issues if you see it as the holy grail for layout, because you are using the tool for something it wasn't designed for.

That isn't the case. Firstly, you need to take a look at the browser stats for the site that you are working on. It may be that in your case you have a very high percentage of old IE users, and so for you, flexbox isn't an option. Even then though, you may be surprised.

If you use flexbox as an enhancement, to get really good alignment of UI elements for example, then you can often take advantage of it to make the experience really great in newer browsers while not locking out old ones.

I would suggest taking a look at Zoe M. Gillenwater's talk. She works for Booking.com. Are they locking out old IE users? Of course not. So she demonstrates how to enhance responsiveness with flexbox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_98SE8WUvLk

That would depend entirely on the browsers you need to support. For example I have a product aimed at web designers. Our support in terms of our marketing site for the up to date flexbox spec is about 98%.

Our product is used by their clients. Some of those people are using IE8 and 9. So the approach we take for our product marketing site and the product itself is different.

Flexbox however isn't really designed for full page layout. The UI items it is really great at are often much easier to deal with in terms of legacy support than you entire layout is. You can often use flexbox to enhance a design even if you can't go all in. I would really encourage you to have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_98SE8WUvLk Zoe works for booking.com and demonstrates how they use flexbox AND ensure legacy support.

My own experience is that I look for novelty outside of the main job I'm doing.

Our product (https://grabaperch.com) is a PHP and MySQL CMS. A self-hosted PHP and MySQL CMS. That means that we are not only PHP, but we have to support really old PHP, we support right back to PHP5.3 as that is the reality of the terrible shared hosting people use. Then in the UI we have to support the browsers that our customer's clients use. So we can't use all the latest front-end techniques.

So it's very easy to get bored and not learn anything new.

To counteract that my personal projects tend to be about really new stuff, for example I've spent a lot of time writing and talking about an emerging CSS spec that interests me. I tend to implement new and interesting things in our own stack too where we don't have the constraints that the product does.

So my best advice would be to see if you can channel your novelty seeking into places outside of work, and accept that work sometimes involves having to stick at something that is boring. Sad but true!

According to my parents I could read at age 3, I can certainly remember petitioning my father to be allowed to read The Hobbit when I was 5. My mother got into trouble when I started school because the teachers didn't know what to do with a 5 year old who could read and write!

I was taught by the "look and say" method, now not used in British schools at least. They teach phonics now. Interestingly my daughter is dyslexic and struggled horribly in school to learn by the phonics method. It was when I started teaching her the old fashioned way that she picked it up.

I have lots of examples of grid layout over at http://gridbyexample.com (you need Chrome with Experimental Web Platform features flag on to view them)

Sigil is really good for tweaking your EPUBs http://sigil-ebook.com/

I use Pandoc to generate my EPUB and then Sigil to do a bit of tidying. Usually just the front matter etc.

Some other resources here, the slides from ConFoo are the most up to date http://rachelandrew.co.uk/presentations/css-books

We already essentially do that sort of thing within Perch (see Blocks: http://grabaperch.com/blog/archive/introducing-blocks). However people still want to be able to add inline links, make things bold and italic, add headings and so on within the content fields.

One could - within Perch - make the editing incredibly granular with Blocks. We find though that whatever we do with structured content, a lot of customers will still just go with the "big textarea and a WYSIWYG".

I would love to see a really good WYSIWYG-like thing that creates Markdown.

I'm one of the founders of Perch (http://grabaperch.com) and we have almost 6 years of experience with Perch - and many more of creating custom CMS solutions before launching Perch. We've always tried to get people to write Textile or Markdown.

When we were developing custom solutions we actually had pretty good success with getting our clients to use Textile, once we'd explained the benefits. With Perch we ship our default templates (which are really just samples) using the MarkItUp editor and set to use Markdown, and not allow HTML. However it's all configurable and we offer editor plugins so people can switch to using Redactor, CKEditor, TinyMCE or create their own editor plugin.

In discussing this stuff with our customers who are developing sites for clients, it's not something that inserts HTML that they want. They just don't want the end client to see the Markdown as they don't think they will cope. I think there is often an assumption that they won't cope, but for whatever reason they end up installing CKEditor or whatever and it allows in a load of junk markup. This makes me sad.

So, an editor that created Markdown yet allowed for some sort of preview of how things will look I can see the benefit of, if just to encourage confidence in not using things that allow inserted HTML.

I was always fascinated by the one in Newcastle University. As a child I used to see it when going to visit my dad who worked there. We never got to ride in it though.

I rarely sleep more than 6 hours, never have. I wake up at 5am naturally and I'm awake. There is definitely a difference between people who are "getting by" on little sleep, and those of us who need less than the "usual" amount. I seem to need less as I get older, and less the more exercise I'm doing (I'm a distance runner) which doesn't seem to make much sense, but there you have it!

There is a load of great advice here: http://speaking.io/

Practice is the main thing, you are speaking about your own project so you know your content well which is a great start.

Make sure that you know the main points you want to get across and make them clearly.

It's very tempting to rush a talk when you are nervous. I used to put BREATH in my speaker notes when I first started speaking to remind myself to pause, breath, think about the next point.

Practice your opening so you know it really well, as many have said the first few minutes are the hardest, so if you really know what you are going to start out with you can get over that bit and into the main talk.

I speak at loads of events, am still always a bit nervous, but it does get easier the more you do it.

I think picking the right idea is the most important thing. A lot of the "never launched" side projects I see were just too big an idea to do as a side project. You need something relatively small, that you can build and launch quickly in a short amount of time. Find a problem that people are willing to pay to have solved, but that is relatively small in terms of time to develop a solution that will solve the problem.

You can do this as a side project because there are lots of things that can make a great side project, bring in a few 1000 dollars a month or more, but wouldn't be interesting to someone trying to launch a business they want to scale.

Look at tools and plugins for software people use already, especially software that has a reasonable pricetag and that people us in their businesses. Anything you can sell to people for whom time is money is a really good start!

I launched a side project 5 and a half years ago which went on to become our entire business. I wrote about that, in a way that I hope will help other people do the same, in my book The Profitable Side Project: http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project