CSS Houdini

The CSS Technical Architecture Group (TAG) Houdini Task Force (more prominently known as CSS Houdini) has been tasked with opening up the black box systems that make up browser rendering by providing APIs for developers to work with and for developers to change the behaviors of processes such as layout and paint.

The CSS Houdini group creates draft specifications to enhance CSS by giving developers more access to the render pipelines of the browser. We will look at two of these APIs: the CSS Paint API, which gives us greater control of the painting aspects of CSS such as background colors, gradients, and masks, and the CSS Properties and Values API, which you can use to register and define custom properties as being of a CSS type (such as a color or length). We will see how the two APIs can be used in unison.

By giving the web developer low-level access to the CSS render pipeline for layout, composition, and paint processes, developers are better able to control...