Philip Walton is an engineer at Google working on improving developer platforms. He’s been building websites professionally for over ten years, and has a passion for teaching others about software development and the web. You can read more of his writing on his website and follow his open source projects on Github.
Have you ever wanted to use a particular CSS feature but didn’t because it wasn’t fully supported in all browsers? Or, worse, it was supported in all browsers, but the support was buggy, inconsistent or even completely incompatible? If this has happened to you — and I’m betting it has — then you should care about Houdini.
Houdini is a new W3C task force whose ultimate goal is to make this problem go away forever. It plans to do that by introducing a new set of APIs that will, for the first time, give developers the power to extend CSS itself, and the tools to hook into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine.
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