Rachel Andrew

  1. What would a 2026 CSS Anthology look like?

    In 2004 I published the first edition of The CSS Anthology with Sitepoint. The idea for the book was to take the entire CSS 2.1 specification, and come up with 101 examples to show people how to use all of the CSS that existed. I have a copy on my shelf, but recently discovered you […]

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  2. The importance of people who care

    I had a few days off work last week. My daughter was visiting, and in the evening we sat and watched episodes of Being Gordon Ramsey, a documentary series following the chef as he opens a huge restaurant project in London. It’s an interesting watch, but the thing that comes across through every word…

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  3. Do you need AI for that?

    My social feed has divided mostly into two camps—those who can now only talk about how excited they are about AI, and those who are refusing to use it at all. I’m somewhat bemused by both of these positions, I see LLMs as a useful tool, in the way that I see spreadsheets as a […]

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  4. Look into the future of the web platform

    Last week I spoke at the very lovely Web Day Out in Brighton. My talk was about browser support, based on the work I’ve done over the past almost five years on Baseline. I ran through the various things you need to consider when deciding whether to use features that don’t meet your Baseline target. …

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  5. Generative AI has broken the subject matter expert/editor relationship

    Some thoughts about managing a publishing pipeline in a world of generative AI.

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  6. 2025 in review

    I concluded my 2024 review post by saying that I hoped to make the move back to the North of England in 2025. The event that defined 2025 (other than my 50th birthday!) is that I managed to do just that, and I’m writing this post from a little town in Northumberland, where I’ve been […]

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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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