One of the many things that I do is to be a part of the CSS Working Group as an Invited Expert. Invited Experts are people who the group wants to be part of the group, but who do not work for a member organization which would confer upon their membership. In this post, I explain a little bit about what I feel my role is in the Working Group, as a way to announce a possible change to my involvement with the support of the Dutch organization, Fronteers.

I’ve always seen my involvement in the CSS Working Group as a two-way thing. I ferry information from the Working Group to authors (folks who are web developers, designers, and people who use CSS for print or EPUB) and from authors to the Working Group. Once I understand a discussion that is happening around a specification which would benefit from author input, I can explain it to authors in a way that doesn’t require detailed knowledge of CSS specifications or browser internals.

This was the motivation behind all of the work I did to explain Grid Layout before it landed in browsers. It is work I continue, for example, my recent article here on Smashing Magazine on Grid Level 2 and subgrid. While I think that far more web developers are capable of understanding the specifications than they often give themselves credit for, I get that people have other priorities! If I can distill and share the most important points, then perhaps we can get more feedback into the group at a point when it can make a difference.

There is something I have discovered while constantly unpacking these subjects in articles and on stage. While I can directly ask people for their opinion — and sometimes I do — the answers to those direct questions are most often the obvious ones. People are put on the spot; they feel they should have an opinion and so give the first answer they think of. Even with they’re in an A or B choice about a subject (when asked to vote), they may not be in a place to fully consider all of the implications.

If I write or talk about a subject, however, I don’t get requests for CSS features. I get questions. Some of those I can answer and I make a note to perhaps better explain that point in future. Some of those questions I cannot answer because CSS doesn’t yet have an answer. I am constantly searching for those unanswered questions, for that is where the future of CSS is. By being a web developer who also happens to work on CSS, I’m in a perfect place to have those conversations and to try to take them back with me to the Working Group when relevant things are being discussed, and so we need to know what authors think.