Earlier this year I had the privileged of attending the CSS Houdini Task Force face-to-face meeting in Sydney, Australia. While there I got to meet many of the Houdini members (most of whom work on browser rendering engines), and I got to see a bit of how the standards process works.

I firmly believe that what’s happening with Houdini represents the biggest and most important shift in how styling and laying is done on the web since the invention of CSS itself. That being said, it’s still something most developers aren’t aware of, and I wanted that to change.

In this article on Smashing Magazine I explain what the Houdini Task Force is and why web developers should care about it now.