Mark Dalgleish is a UI Engineer who’s worked in the web for a long time. Recently, he’s been part of a team — also consisting of Webpack author Tobias Koppers from Germany, Alexey Litvinov from Russia, and fellow Australian developers Glen Maddern, Josh Johnston and Josh Gillies — that succeeded in transforming global CSS to locally scoped CSS, now known as CSS Modules. What does this mean? In short, it’s transforming CSS from a technology designed for basic documents into something much more appropriate for usage in large applications.
“When you build a complex system, the way to make it maintainable is to try and make it so that at any one time, you don’t have to hold too much of the application in your head at once. If you don’t do that, that’s usually where bugs start to come in; someone comes in to make a simple change, and they end up breaking 12 other things.”
It was in working closely with other technologies that use modules split up amongst smaller files, that the idea to improve CSS was born.
“When it came to CSS, we were missing the same technological progress (as React from Facebook)…the breakthrough that we helped push through with CSS Modules was to make it fundamentally work like these other technologies, instead of relying on us being very careful, which other technologies did not require,” he says.
This month, Mark is abroad presenting his expertise at two international tech conferences –Reactive2015 in Bratislava, Slovakia, and CSSconf Asia, in Singapore, at which he will be one of only 10 speakers.
In considering addressing the international community, Mark reflects on the local, small victories.
“What’s really interesting is the way that on this little project at SEEK, we were constantly pushing ourselves to try new things, and it became this really interesting idea that just caught on. It was the first time for me; that I’ve been involved in something that really took off in that way,” he says proudly.
“It’s a really exciting part of the way the web community works — we all work in the open and share ideas and write about them and publish code for other people to use. We use these big-name, well-known projects every day that people just kind of build and release for free.”
“It’s easy to think that these things came out fully formed; that they were these perfect ideas written by geniuses,” he continues, “but I much more viscerally understand now that these things just start as simple ideas, and they catch on. Once they’re out in the public eye, if you’ve got an interesting idea, things can snowball fast.”
Beyond the conferences, Mark intends to keep on pushing himself to be critical and cutting edge.
“That’s where the new ideas really come from, when people are mixing and matching these new ideas with good software engineering principles, and seeing what comes out,” he says. “It’s amazing to see what you can contribute to the wider community,” he concludes.
Conference links:
To read more about Mark and his work in this space, click here.
