There are two events drifting the web back to a place of what feels like peaceful simplicity.

CSS Day is coming up in June. It’s speaker lineup is packed with some of the most thoughtful CSS practitioners and creators the web has. There’s a lot to be excited about there, but what’s most refreshing is that it’s about CSS. No frameworks, no vibe coding. Just. Simple. CSS.

They will be talking about building something sustainable and sturdy using CSS as a foundation. They’ll be returning to a core technology that makes the web great and showing what it makes possible in practice.

Then there’s the jQuery reunion. jQuery left its mark on the history of web development. But it’s important to remember that its genesis began at a time when the web was filled with a lot of potential. And I think it’s fair to say that jQuery helped it find that potential and deliver it to a massive audience (something it’s also fair to say it’s largely still doing on many, many websites).

It’s a good moment to return to. To turn over and examine what we were all trying to gain and work towards in that moment. I expect we’ll see a lot of that kind of thing at the reunion.

Hidden in these examinations of the core technologies of the web is a desire to return to a web design industry that was innovating and creating at a rapid clip. The vision of the web was to share, outwardly, information with one another. And returning to simplicity is often what makes that possible. It makes the web broadly accessible. It turns anyone into a web creator.

Maybe us old timers will keep trying to make things simple. And maybe that’s a good thing actually.