660: Teaching CSS, Conferences, and Masonry Updates

What It Covers

Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert examine CSS teaching methods, conference attendance strategies, and Apple's new item-flow proposal that unifies CSS Grid and Flexbox properties to resolve the masonry layout debate between WebKit and Chrome.

Key Questions Answered

• •CSS Teaching Strategy: Start students with existing CMS content, style it as a clone of known designs, then customize. This approach teaches real-world constraints and arbitrary content handling rather than pixel-perfect mockups from scratch.
• •Item-Flow Properties: Apple proposes four new properties (item-direction, item-wrap, item-pack, item-slack) to unify Grid and Flexbox behavior. Item-pack collapse replaces grid-template-rows collapse for masonry layouts, eliminating the need for display masonry as a separate layout mode.
• •Conference Selection: Digital conferences work best when capped at three hours maximum attention span, allowing attendees to manage work obligations simultaneously. Physical conferences provide more value when you already know attendees, reducing networking pressure and increasing meaningful connections.
• •Dense Packing Control: Item-pack property enables Flexbox to gain dense packing capabilities previously only available in Grid. Item-slack sets tolerance thresholds (like one em) for column height differences, controlling how aggressively the layout engine fills available space.