It's not dark magic: Pulling back the curtains from your stylesheets

All too often developers are left completely puzzled when the browser renders CSS in ways they didnt expect. But its not dark magic; we know that computers are just parsing our instructions. While many talks discuss how to fix common bugs, Aimee Knight focuses on the reasons behind them, leading a deep dive into browser internals to see how our styles are parsed and rendered.

Chances are if you’re a web developer, you’re going to have to write some CSS from time to time. When you first looked at CSS, it probably seemed like a breeze. You added a border here, changed some colors there. JavaScript was the hard part of frontend development. Somewhere during your progression as a frontend developer, this changed, even as many developers in the frontend community simply dismiss CSS as a toy language. The truth is that many of us don’t actually understand what our CSS is doing under the hood. We all like to make jokes about it, but how many of us have actually taken the time to try and understand the CSS we’re writing. How many of us have actually reasonably debugged an issue to the next lowest abstraction layer when we hit a wall? All too often, we settle for the first Stack Overflow answer or hack or just let the issue go entirely. Take a step back and stop mindlessly throwing darts at the dartboard. Join Aimee Knight for a deep dive into browser internals to learn how your styles are parsed and rendered and explore the most common issues developers face, such as z-index, the cascade, and positioning. Sure, you may still not have an eye for design, but you might just walk away a CSS guru.