Video of the Week: Ryan Seddon–Houdini - Web Directions

Video of the Week: Ryan Seddon–Houdini

John Allsopp 6th May, 2016 @johnallsopp

Don’t you sometimes wish you could create your own CSS properties? Not just some syntactic sugar to make life easier like Sass and other pre-processors, but honest-to-goodness properties, like new display options, painting your own images from JavaScript as backgrounds, borders and elsewhere images can be used, and so on. And all in ways that don’t hugely impact the browser performance the way for example JavaScript based property animation does?

Enter a brand new (still very much under development but so cool we have to talk about it even at this stage) CSS feature, code-named Houdini (if you’re not entirely familiar with Harry Houdini, he was a hugely popular illusionist and escape-artist from the early 20th Century. And why ‘Houdini’? Because it allows you to escape the current constraints of CSS (yes, a dad joke)).

There’s a great article going into some detail about Houdini at our good friends Smashing Magazine from a few weeks back (yep, it’s still very new), but this is definitely something we feel will arrive sooner than you might think.

So this week’s video of the week is from a recent post-Respond “mega meetup” with MelbCSS, Be Responsive and MelbJS, featuring Ryan Seddon on Houdini.

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Thanks for an amazing few days Web Directions. So many great themes of empathy, inclusion, collaboration, business impact through design, and keeping our future deeply human.

Laura van Doore Head of Product Design, Fathom

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