Why the World Needs CSS Developers

In the last ten years, give or take a few, CSS has grown extensively with the addition of more and more features, thus gradually becoming quite elaborate and complicated. The CSS of our days is very different from the CSS of the 2001–2010 decade.

Before I start explaining why the world needs CSS developers, we must go back and look at the history of CSS.

The History of CSS

In the decade of 2001–2010, while the internet was conquering the world, CSS was stuck. Internet Explorer (versions 6–8) was the leading browser, and since Microsoft, at that time, didn’t pay much attention to CSS specifications and didn’t have any interest in adding new features to it, CSS stayed at version 2.1 for all those years.

Even in the years from 2007 and up, when modern browsers such as Firefox and Chrome started to appear, we still had to support Internet Explorer, and

that held us back. Being the main browser that ruled at that time, IE set the virtually non-existent speed of CSS development. In some ways, this was the ‘dark age’ of the internet.

The Constitutive Events of the New Era of CSS

As someone who was a web developer at that time, I saw two constitutive events which changed the CSS world and the web in general:

• The Start of the Smartphone Era (June 29, 2007 ) — this new era began with the release of the first iPhone. That release brought the need to support new CSS features which would suit the new category of web devices.
• The Release of the Chrome Browser (September 2, 2008) — Chrome was a new browser, which began as a desktop computer application.
  Up until then, Internet Explorer was the primary ruler of the web and dictated its development.