Cassondra Roberts
Consultant
Cassondra Roberts is a design systems architect and W3C CSS Working Group invited expert specializing in web component architecture. She founded PatternFly Elements at Red Hat—the open source design system now used across organizations like Google, IBM, and Fidelity—and spent four years advancing Adobe’s Spectrum Design System, where she led CSS architecture and AI integration. With over a decade building component libraries at enterprise scale, Cassondra focuses on the critical architectural decisions that make design systems scalable, maintainable, and accessible. She’s passionate about web standards, component design, and helping teams choose the right architecture for their specific needs. Through Allons-y Consulting, she helps organizations build design systems that actually work.
Sisyphus Had It Easy: Navigating the Web Component Styling Landscape
May 14 - 14:15h
Every time you think you’ve figured out web component styling, you hit a hidden limitation and have to start over. Shadow DOM encapsulation breaks your global styles. Constructable stylesheets have browser support gaps. CSS custom properties work until they don’t scale. You roll the boulder up the mountain, only to watch it tumble back down.
This talk will show us how to break the cycle. We’ll map the complete styling landscape — from constructable stylesheets to CSS parts, from custom properties to global inheritance patterns. You’ll learn which approaches actually hold at the summit, understand the tradeoffs that matter, and walk away with a decision framework that keeps you out of a constant refactoring cycle. The mountain doesn’t get smaller, but the path to the top becomes clear.