Rachel Andrew

  1. A matter of fact

    I’ve been an amateur genealogist since I was a teenager. I started before the internet existed. This was a world where finding a single fact about a not-too-distant ancestor could involve an entire day of hauling huge indexes off shelves, then waiting five days for the certificate to arrive. It was time…

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  2. Reading flow ships in Chrome 137

    I’m really excited that the reading-flow and reading-order properties are in Chrome 137 (current beta, will be Chrome stable as of May 27, 2025). Finding a way to deal with the visual and source order disconnect created by grid and flex layout has been something I’ve kept returning to ever since grid…

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  3. CSS multicol block direction wrapping

    Ever since I became an editor of the Multiple-column layout specification I’ve wanted to add the ability to let overflow columns wrap in the block direction, rather than extend out in the inline direction—creating the sort of horizontal scrollbar that almost nobody wants. And, now we’re doing it. I’m…

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  4. Blog questions challenge

    I was tagged by Jon Hicks and it seems like as good a time as any to return to ye olde blogge days, so here’s my answers. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I had some personal notes on an older incarnation of this site, and when blogging became a thing, I […]

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  5. 2024 in review

    2024 went fast, and this post looks back at some of the things that featured in another far too busy year. Work Life at Google has not got any less challenging or busy during 2024, but I’m proud of the things my team and I have achieved. Everything that ends up on web.dev or developer.chrome.com […]

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  6. Public speaking in 2024

    In the before times—before COVID, before I was a Google employee, before the seismic shift my life took in 2020 and 2021—I travelled for around half of the year, speaking at conferences and leading workshops. These days, I don’t do as much speaking, but I get to do some, and I’ve had some great opportunities…

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  7. A progress update on reading-flow

    There’s a First Public Working Draft of CSS Display 4, which includes the work on the new reading-flow property. The property aims to solve the issue where the source (and therefore tab) order of a page gets disconnected from layout when using CSS grid layout or flexbox. This is a problem I’ve been talking…

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  8. When is the right time to share our excitement about new web features?

    When we share content about emerging web platform features, we have to be careful that we aren’t frustrating people with things they can’t use yet. However there is a place for talking about new things, and people who enjoy hearing about them. This post is about some of the ways I try to meet the [……

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  9. Masonry and good defaults

    I’ve been writing about and teaching people CSS layout for a very long time. People sometimes call me an expert in CSS. I don’t know about that, but I’m confident in claiming expertise in teaching and writing about CSS. I’ve been doing this for a long time, about 25 years. Over that time I’ve learned…

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  10. Masonry and reading order

    I recently wrote a post about the CSS masonry proposal on the Chrome for Developers blog. I was keen not to muddy the waters with anything that wasn’t the main point of that post—which was to explain why the Chrome team felt that masonry should be specified outside of grid. Since then, a couple of […

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