How to Turn Your Ugly Old CSS into a Clean Future-Ready Beauty

“Refactoring CSS to make it maintainable, modular, speed optimized, documented and testable without devoting a whole month to it.”

Development Hall 30 min

  • What is the talk about?

    Robin: A year ago I inherited 10,000 lines of styles. With no documentation. With long slow selectors. And with a lot of unused rubbish. I decided to change that.

    I will share my method, several useful utilities, and some fails I experienced. Alongside with reasons why everyone should take care about their CSS.

  • Who is it for?

    Robin: Coders with thousands of lines of CSS mess, hundreds of cypher selectors, tens of !important’s, and no redesign on the horizon - hopelessly bitting their nails every time they are asked to ‘little change the behaviour of this button.’

  • What will the audience get from it?

    Robin: The ability to create a plan of transition to better CSS, tell easy and difficult steps apart, have fun writing good code (again). And, of course, the courage to do it.

  • What do you presently work at?

    Robin: Trying to solve an abstract non-linear optimisation problem: providing maximum usability and performance of web applications with clean maintainable code, supporting (some) legacy browsers, using modern approaches - but not too much of them - and, most importantly, not getting mad.

  • Which of your existing achievements do you value the most?

    Robin: That multiple times I was able to bite the bullet and get excited to learn a subject which seemed boring and unnecessary at first sight, but showed up to be very interesting when researched more deeply.

  • What would you like to achieve?

    Robin: To write, record or code an article, a book, a show, a podcast, a utility or an application which would help others to get better (in any sense of that word). And that it - eventually - become well known.

  • What do you look forward to at the WebExpo?

    Robin: As usual: meet people, listen to their speeches, eat snacks with them, swear at organisers together and get inspired while doing so.

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Robin Pokorný

Front-End Engineer LMC