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Negative Margins
9.3.2020
PPK digs into the subject, which he found woefully undercovered in web tech documentation. Our entry doesn't mention them at all, which I'll aim to fix.
Agree on this situation:
This is by far the most common use case for negative margins. You give a container a padding so that its contents have...
Helping Browsers Optimize With The CSS Contain Property
10.2.2020
There is a growing number of things that we have to do to help the browser achieve for peak performance.
Responsive image syntax has several. For example, needing to tell the browser how large the image will be in our layout with the sizes attribute and how big the images are with w descriptors....
Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features
7.2.2020
It’s entirely possible to build custom checkboxes, radio buttons, and toggle switches these days, while staying semantic and accessible. We don’t even need a single line of JavaScript or extra HTML elements! It’s actually gotten easier lately than it has been in the past. Let’s take a look.
Here’s...
Get Moving (or not) with CSS Motion Path
3.2.2020
We just linked up the idea that offset-path can be cleverly used to set type on a path. Don't miss Michelle Barker's experimentation either, with drawing paths or animating text along a path.
Dan Wilson has also been following this tech for quite a while and points out why the sudden surge...
Resizing Values in Steps in CSS
30.1.2020
There actually is a steps() function in CSS, but it's only used for animation. You can't, for example, tell an element it's allowed to grow in height but only in steps of 10px. Maybe someday? I dunno. There would have to be some pretty clear use cases that something like background-repeat: space...
Set Type on a Circle… with offset-path
28.1.2020
Here's some legit CSS trickery from yuanchuan. There is this CSS property offset-path. Once upon a time, it was called motion-path and then it was renamed. I sort of rolled my eyes at the time, because the property is so obviously for animating things along a path. But you don't have to use it...
Min and Max Width/Height in CSS
24.1.2020
Here's a nice deep dive into min-width / min-height / max-width / max-height from Ahmad Shadeed. I like how Ahmad applies the properties to real-world design situations in addition to explaining how it works. In the very first demo, for example, he shows a button where min-width is used as a method...
Building Multi-Directional Layouts
23.1.2020
There are some new features in CSS that can assist us with building layouts for different directions and languages with ease. This article is about CSS logical properties and values (e.g. margin-inline-start).  These are a W3C working draft that still going under heavy editing, but have...
The Web in 2020: Extensibility and Interoperability
22.1.2020
In the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of change and diversion in regard to web technologies. In 2020, I foresee us as a web community heading toward two major trends/goals: extensibility and interoperability. Let’s break those down.
Extensibility
Extensibility describes...
Thinking Through Styling Options for Web Components
16.1.2020
Where do you put styles in web components?
I'm assuming that we're using the Shadow DOM here as, to me, that's one of the big draws of a web component: a platform thing that is a uniquely powerful thing the platform can do. So this is about defining styles for a web component in a don't-leak-out...
How many CSS properties are there?
15.1.2020
Tomasz Łakomy posted a joke tweet about naming all the CSS attributes and Tejas Kumar replied with a joke answer, going as far as making an npm module. You can even run a terminal command to see them:
npx get-all-css-properties
You'll get 259 of them. The source code uses the website quackit.com...
Re-creating the ‘His Dark Materials’ Logo in CSS
11.1.2020
The text logo has a slash cut through the text. You set two copies on top of one another, cropping both of them with the clip-path property.
What's interesting to me is how many cool design effects require multiple copies of an element to do something cool. To get the extra copy, at least with...
Multi-Thumb Sliders: General Case
8.1.2020
The first part of this two-part series detailed how we can get a two-thumb slider. Now we'll look at a general multi-thumb case, but with a different and better technique for creating the fills in between the thumbs. And finally, we'll dive into the how behind the styling a realistic 3D-looking...
Multi-Thumb Sliders: Particular Two-Thumb Case
7.1.2020
This is a concept I first came across a few years back when Lea Verou wrote an article on it. Multi-range sliders have sadly been removed from the spec since, but something else that has happened in the meanwhile is that CSS got better — and so have I, so I recently decided to make my...
7 Uses for CSS Custom Properties
27.12.2019
I find all seven of these quite clever and useful.
I particularly like using custom properties when you can sneak a variation into a place where you'd normally have to re-declare a whole big chunk of code.
.some-element {
background-color: hsla(
var(--h, 120),
var(--s, 50),
var(--l...
Moving Rainbow Underlines
23.12.2019
I absolutely love the design of the Sandwich site. Among many beautiful features are these headlines with rainbow underlines that move as you scroll. It's not scroll-jacking — it's just a minor design feature that uses scroll position to enact a little movement.
To draw the rainbows...
Stream-Crossing Confusion
23.12.2019
Should I use WordPress or React hooks?
Should I use D3 or CSS?
Should I use Markdown or JSON?
Can I use flexbox in Gatsby?
Can I use custom properties in Jekyll?
Should I use HTML or the cloud?
How do I add dark mode to my Vue site?
These are tongue-in-cheek, but there is a point to be made here....
Make a smooth shadow, friend.
19.12.2019
One box-shadow is cool and all, but check out Philipp Brumm's tool for building out comma-separated multiple box-shadows, which result in a much smoother and more natural look.
This reminds me very much of the idea for easing linear-gradient. In a gradient, this smoothing effect is handled...
Maduro Plans to Airdrop Petro to Municipal Leaders and Eligible Citizens
15.12.2019
The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro wants the nation state-issued cryptocurrency, petro (PTR) to have the same usability properties as a physical currency. On December 13, Maduro explained on national television that the Superintendence of Crypto-Assets and Related Activities (Sunacrip)...
Motion Paths – Past, Present and Future
6.12.2019
Cassie Evans has a great intro to motion paths. That is, being able to animate an element along a path. Not just up/down/left/right, but whatever curvy/wiggly/weird path you want.
It's an interesting subject because there are so many different technologies helping to do it over time. SMIL...