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Creating CSS APIs without JavaScript With the datasette-css-properties plugin
8.1.2021
Simon Willison has a project called Datasette, an open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data. I’m not sure I’m qualified to explain it, but it’s like a tool to make handling data easier and doing more — …
The post Creating CSS APIs without JavaScript With...
Custom Properties as State
5.1.2021
Here’s a fun idea from James Stanley: a CSS file (that presumably updates daily) containing CSS custom properties for “seasonal” colors (e.g. spring is greens, fall is oranges). You’d then use the values to theme your site, knowing that those …
The post Custom...
CSS Individual Transform Properties in Safari Technology Preview
30.12.2020
The WebKit blog details how to use individual CSS Transform properties in the latest version of Safari Technology Preview. This brings the browser in line with the CSS Transforms Module Level 2 spec, which breaks out the translate(), …
The post CSS Individual Transform Properties in Safari...
Simulating Drop Shadows with the CSS Paint API
29.12.2020
Ask a hundred front-end developers, and most, if not all, of them will have used the box-shadow property in their careers. Shadows are enduringly popular, and can add an elegant, subtle effect if used properly. But shadows occupy a strange …
The post Simulating Drop Shadows with the...
A Utility Class for Covering Elements
26.12.2020
Big ol’ same to Michelle Barker here:
Here’s something I find myself needing to do again and again in CSS: completely covering one element with another. It’s the same CSS every time: the first element (the one that needs to be covered) has position: relative applied to it....
Edge Everything
22.12.2020
The series is a wrap my friends! Thanks for reading and a big special thanks to all the authors this year who shared something they have learned. Many authors really swung wide with thoughts about how we can be better and do better, which of course I really love.
Adam showed us logical properties...
Old is Solid; New Gets Talked About
15.12.2020
When Chris asked me to write about “one thing I learned about building websites this year” I admit my brain immediately went through a list of techniques and CSS properties I started using this year. But then I paused. Other people can write about that much better than I can....
Using CSS Custom Properties to Adjust Variable Font Weights in Dark Mode
10.12.2020
Black isn’t always slimming.
When recently testing a dark mode option for one of my sites, I experienced first-hand the issue that Robin Rendle addresses in this article. All of my page text — headings and body copy — appeared to bulk up when I switched to dark mode. And it didn’t matter what fonts...
Late to Logical
7.12.2020
2020 brought another wave of logical property features to major browsers and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my investment into logical, rather than physical, web styling. I feel like I’ve learned a new way to speak about the box model that results in less written code with more global coverage.
p {
...
Color Theming with CSS Custom Properties and Tailwind
19.11.2020
Custom properties not only enable us to make our code more efficient, but allow us to work some real magic with CSS too. One area where they have huge potential is theming. At Atomic Smash we use Tailwind CSS, a utility class framework, for writing our styles. In this article, we’ll look at...
A Complete Guide to CSS Gradients
17.11.2020
Like how you can use the background-color property in CSS to declare a solid color background, you can use the background-image property not only to declare image files as backgrounds but gradients as well. Using CSS gradients is better for control and performance than using an actual image (of...
Logical layout enhancements with flow-relative shorthands
16.11.2020
Admission: I’ve never worked on a website that was in anything other than English. I have worked on websites that were translated by other teams, but I didn’t have much to do with it. I do, however, spend a lot of time thinking in terms of block-level and inline-level elements....
Libraries for SVG Drawing Animations
11.11.2020
In 2013, Jake Archibald introduced this cool trick of animating an SVG path to look like it’s drawing itself. It’s 2020 now, and the trick is still popular. I’ve seen it on a lot of websites I’ve visited recently. I, too, feature an animated SVG loader on my website using one of the libraries I’ll...
Understanding flex-grow, flex-shrink, and flex-basis
11.11.2020
When you apply a CSS property to an element, there’s lots of things going on under the hood. For example, let’s say we have some HTML like this:
<div class="parent"<div class="child"Child</div<div class="child"Child</div<div class="child"Child</div</div
And...
Additive Animations in CSS
3.11.2020
Daniel C. Wilson explains how with CSS @keyframe animations, when multiple of them are applied to an element, they do both work. But if any properties are repeated, only the last one works. They override each other. I’ve seen this limitation overcome by applying keyframes to nested elements...
The CSS Custom Property Toggle Trick
29.10.2020
Back in July 2020, I got an email from James0x57 (I always try to refer to people by their name, but I think I get the sense they prefer to go by screen name) that says:
The entire world of branching conditional logic and bulk feature toggling for custom CSS properties is possible and only exists...
Creating CSS Shapes with Emoji
24.10.2020
CSS Shapes is a standard that lets us create geometric shapes over floated elements that cause the inline contents — usually text — around those elements to wrap along the specified shapes.
Such a shaped flow of text looks good in editorial designs or designs that work with text-heavy contents...
Mastermind of Alleged Billion Dollar Spanish Pyramid Scheme Arrested, Faces 16 Year Prison Sentence
23.10.2020
The CEO of Arbistar the Spanish investment company, Santiago Fuentes, has been arrested and arraigned on charges of fraud, belonging to a criminal organization and money laundering. Fuentes, who has been in hiding since September, was arrested at one of his properties in the south of Tenerife....
Announcing the 2020 State of CSS Survey
20.10.2020
Last year’s State of CSS Survey yielded interesting results. There’s the quick adoption of features, like calc() and CSS custom properties. There’s also the overwhelming opinion that CSS is fun to write even as we see a growing reliance on CSS-in JS. We also saw some predictable...
How to Conditionally Add Attributes to Objects
16.10.2020
JavaScript is full of tricks that you don’t know you want until you … want … them. Or maybe just until you see them. One trick I recently realized was conditionally adding attributes to React elements. Of course this trick essentially boils down to conditionally adding properties...