Rachel Andrew lives in Bristol, England. She is a member of the CSS Working Group, where she edits the Multicol and Page Floats specifications. She works for Google as Content Lead for Chrome DevRel, working on web.dev and the Chrome Developers site.

Rachel has been working on the web since 1996 and writing about the web for almost as long. She is the author or co-author of 22 books including The New CSS Layout, and a regular contributor to a number of publications both on and offline. Rachel is a frequent speaker at web development and design events.

Rachel is a keen distance runner and likes to encourage people to come for a run when attending conferences, with varying degrees of success.

A pragmatic guide to browser support

It’s tempting to think of Baseline as creating a hard line. If a feature isn’t Baseline, then it’s not ready for use. However, we all know that web development is a world of “it depends”.

While we can in most cases make an objective, unopinionated call on whether something is or is not interoperable, it’s much harder to decide whether something is a good candidate for progressive enhancement. That requires an opinion, knowledge of the audience, even the exact use of the feature.

So, how should you think about using Baseline to inform your browser strategy? What about those features that have limited availability but are obvious progressive enhancements or have a great polyfill? Is there a difference between a feature that’s only in one browser and one that’s stable in two?

In this talk you’ll learn how to balance the desire for a clear line with accepting and even benefiting from the inherent messiness of the web platform.