CSS Deep Dive: Patterns, Antipatterns, and 60fps

CSS is a big part of any web application, and core to building great-looking, high-performing stuff for any device. But CSS is infamously difficult to maintain, and we write a lot of it without really understanding its fundamentals. Add in the awesome transform and hardware acceleration capabilities of CSS3, and you get even more potential for messy code. With a solid grasp of how browsers interpret CSS, you can build apps as flashy or simple as you want. Who knows? You might not need Bootstrap ever again!

This session will dig deep in to the essentials of CSS3, including selector syntax, efficient cascading, and transforms and transitions. We'll discuss several CSS patterns and antipatterns. We'll cover CSS preprocessors LESS and Sass, and examine the way they help to build more maintainable style sheets. We'll also dig in to the browser developer tools to see exactly how CSS is applied, how animations can be hardware accelerated, how you get to the elusive 60 frames-per-second.

About Danny Brian

Danny Brian got his programming start as a backend developer, wrangling Perl to do all sorts of things for which it was never intended. He wrote some books on software development and document-oriented databases. Eventually he found his true calling: Front-end development. In this “new career” Danny has worked as a designer, Flash developer, and application architect. Today Danny's projects include mobile game development with both HTML5 and the Unity platform. His goal? “To build stuff that people actually like, that stick around for more than a few years, and to help others do the same.”

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