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Sneak Peek Into The Future: Selectors, Level 4 - my article for Smashing Magazine

Yesterday my article about CSS Selectors Level 4 was finally published on Smashing Magazine’s Coding section - you can go there right away and read it. I just wanted to add a few words about the writing process.

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I started working on the topic on January just after I did my presentation during meet.js Summit about ”CSS4 and the future of CSS”. I was motivated by Vitaly Friedman’s Open Call For International Communities and wanted to test my skills.

It was quite a challenge for me - almost 3k words long article would be my personal best when writing in English. I finished it around July and passed it over to the Smashing Editorial team. It took a lot of time to check it and validate the content, but finally it was published and after all I’m very happy about the result. In the meantime, on September Tab Atkins wrote that ”There is no such thing as CSS4“.

It sounded tough and it was quite clear that CSS4.pl was doomed to fail, will die slowly and will be forgotten. Nonetheless I was stating almost exactly the same in my Smashing article that was written by Tab - CSS is just CSS, no matter what is the actual version of the W3C specification, although he stated it very rough.

It looks like in those few months after finishing the article and having it published there was a slight update to the W3C specification about Selectors Level 4, so there might be some changes. It’s the nature of the working draft - everything can change while people work on it.

Some projects will be successful, some other won’t and that’s a normal thing. One have to experiment and try different things. CSS4.pl was not a good idea, but for example js13kGames competition that I started was a great one and I will do my best to make the 2013 edition bigger and better. You just have to carry on, learn from mistakes of every project you make and keep trying until you succeed.