Hover, our 100% CSS focussed conference returns for 2022

CSS might not have been what?brought?me to the Web, but it’s very much what made me first deeply engage with the technology of the Web.?

Before its arrival I’d built quite a few web sites, and was teaching a course that involved building web sites at TAFE (post secondary education in Australia that’s something not unlike community college in the US).?

I’m not sure where I first learned about CSS, perhaps the newsgroup?alt.hypertext?that I frequented back then (that was where Tim Berners Lee first announced the World Wide Web project). At a time when web site design was increasingly images in place of text, tables, and even frames, for layout (these were called ‘killer websites’ back then) CSS even in its nascent stages just made sense.

I quickly incorporated CSS into the course I was teaching, and when I couldn’t find good tools for folks to work with CSS, I started work on?Style Master, which I actively developed for nearly 15 years, and which ended up on Mac and Windows.?

Over the years I wrote numerous articles and tutorials on CSS, and my book?Developing with Web Standards?focusses heavily on CSS as well.

Meanwhile our conferences have always featured a healthy dose of CSS (here’s?dozens of the presentations on CSS?from our conference going back to 2012 collected on our?streaming service?Conffab, many you can watch with a free account.)?

So, when we started thinking deeply about what our online conferences should look like, and came to the conclusion that an opportunity online conferences opened up was to go deeply into relatively narrow areas of technology and practice (something more challenging with in-person events that typically end up much broader, but less in-depth) literally the first area we focussed on was CSS, with?Hover, a conference we ran early 2021, to great success.?

We called it ‘the conference CSS deserves’, since it’s really not unfair to say CSS, for all its impact and importance, does not get the level of attention that other Web technologies, particularly JavaScript, does.?

Hundreds and hundreds of folks from around the world attended online.

Announcing Hover 2022

Now to kick off our 2022 season of front end focused conferences,?Hover?returns. Again curated with?Hui Jung Chen, Hover features new and emerging CSS features, as well as practices for working with CSS. If you work with CSS in any way, Hover is for you.

It takes place online, across 2 weeks, on April 1 & 8. Each Friday there’s a live session of around 3-4 hours, repeated 3 times, so that no matter where you are in the world, you can attend at a time convenient for you. The sessions are then available on catch up shortly after the finish of the last session.

Speakers are on hand as much as is practicable in a chat right alongside their presentation, to add more context, further links, and to answer questions, and there’s a lively chat you can participate in as well.

New CSS Features

We’ve been way out in front of important trends in CSS, like grid, flexbox, Houdini, container queries, web fonts, filters, CSS variables and much more at our conferences for many years, and that’s something you’ll get from Hover in 2022, where we’ll cover a range of new important CSS features. Keep track of what’s here, and what’s coming.

Best Practices

But working with a technology is not simply using the features–it’s the practices to help get the most from these features as well. So we’ll be covering bigger picture issues like refactoring and debugging CSS, the impact of CSS on performance, responsive design without media queries, and typography and CSS.

Who’s speaking?

Today we’ve announced he first part of the program, with the remainder (including some big names in the CSS world) to be announced next week–so visit the?hover?site to see all the topics and speakers announced so far.

Register today

Registration and early bird pricing is open now for?Hover?(and indeed all our 2022 conferences.) Pricing depends on where you live (to make out events as inclusive as possible, prices reflect developer earning power in your location), so just visit the site to see the price in your location.?

For folks in Australia early bird pricing is $AUD195, in the US $USD195, in the EU €159.00, UK ￡139.00, meanwhile in a country like India, folks pay ?2,995, and in the Philippines ?1,995.

If you’re in a country where developer salaries aren’t at the level of locations like the US or EU, but you’re still seeing dollar pricing at our site, just drop us a line and we’ll make sure you pay the best possible price.

Season’s Pass

All 6 of our 2022 online conferences?focus on a different aspect of front end engineering–CSS, JavaScript, performance, PWA’s, Accessibility, security and more.

Across the year we’ll keep you up to date with developments in all the key areas of technology and practice front end development, at a?fraction?of the price of a single in person conference.?

And a season pass includes bonus access to all of our?Conffab?library?of well over 700 presentations from past Web Directions (and other) conferences.

Seasons passes cost $AUD595 ($USD595, ￡419.00, €499.00, ?5,795, ?8,495) and so on, again adapted to developer earning power in your location. You can even pay monthly if that makes life easier (at $59.95).