A supporting org for CSS (dev tooling)

[romainmenke]

I am posting this under csstools, but each time I write CSS tooling or CSS tools I am not referring to this GitHub org, but rather all tools that in some way are used to author CSS.

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CSS is dramatically under funded.

(almost?) everyone working on CSS tooling is doing this as a side project, after hours, while also working full time jobs.

Some quick examples of the difference in funding amounts:

CSS	JS
https://opencollective.com/postcss (10k annual)	https://opencollective.com/babel (100k annual)
https://opencollective.com/stylelint (10k annual)	https://opencollective.com/eslint (150k annual)

https://opencollective.com/csstools is at ±1k annual

CSS is so under funded that we don't get around to changing that.

• Raising funds and convincing people to support our efforts takes energy and time that can't be spend on writing code.
• Need to cross a critical threshold to let someone switch to doing CSS work full time. ~1k per month doesn't provide the needed stability. Needs to be much much more.

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Yet CSS is critically important.
It is one of the basic building blocks making up every website (and electron app).

CSS should be very well funded.
People working on tools for CSS should be well supported.

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Effects of not having sufficient funding:

• maintenance on critical tools can't be guaranteed and often falls behind
• adoption of new CSS language features in tools is slow
• poor developer experience for very basic things (variable in another file...)
• insufficient people who are working on tools and also engaging with spec editors at the CSSWG
• ...

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What I think we need:

Enough funds to support several people working full time on improving the developer experience for CSS. This should cover people with experience in linters, parsers, language servers, ...

But also people doing triage, code review and engaging with developers to discover pain points, ...

A foundation for CSS?

https://openjsf.org exists, we should have a mirror for CSS.

A single entity could be more successful in gathering and distributing funds?

It is currently unclear which tools exist and require funding. Someone willing to fund various CSS tools possibly doesn't know where to start?

A foundation could advocate for CSS developer tools collectively.

Such a collective effort will invariably become a gatekeeper. Some projects/efforts will get funded, others will not. I personally think that is still better than not funding anything sufficiently.

The process should be open, welcoming everyone to the conversation.

Being supportive, not disruptive

I think we need to support what already exists.

People working on the current CSS tools have a massive amount of knowledge and experience and I think we should support these people. I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel here.

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Small first steps

• explore what form this could/should take
• explore what a comfortable number of people would be to support CSS tooling properly
• make a list of existing CSS projects that accept funding
• would be interesting to hear from projects what they need (as precise as possible)

Maybe a shared advocate would already be a massive help?

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Please let me know what you think and if this is something you are interested in working on?

[Shen37]

Hello i am interested in this project kindly reach to me on my discord by "shen.li"

[romainmenke]

@Shen37 You can write any comments or questions here, in public :)

[romainmenke]

Written a bit more about what I think is the set of tools that should exist and should be well supported/funded: https://github.com/orgs/csstools/discussions/2