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Responsive Designs and CSS Custom Properties: Building a Flexible Grid System
26.2.2019
Last time, we looked at a few possible approaches for declaring and using CSS custom properties in responsive designs. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at CSS variables and how to use them in reusable components and modules. We will learn how to make our variables optional and set fallback...
JavaScript Proxy
26.2.2019
I’ve always loved the flexibility of Objects and prototypes in JavaScript, but for a long time, I felt that a level of dynamism was lacking. JavaScript eventually added get and set methods for object properties, which was an awesome step, but there was still room for improvement....
iconsvg.xyz
25.2.2019
There is a lot to like about Gaddafi Rusli's ICONSVG.
It provides inline <svg>, which is the most generically useful way to deliver them, and probably how they should be used anyway. Each icon is a tiny amount of SVG and I'd bet they were all hand-golfed.
They are all stroke-based, so they...
Dealing with overflow and position: sticky;
25.2.2019
Any overflow value other than visible and no height is the enemy of child elements with position: sticky;. It's like that element is ready to stick when the parent scrolls, but it never does because the height is unconstrained. Adding a fixed height can solve the issue, but that's not always...
Responsive Designs and CSS Custom Properties: Defining Variables and Breakpoints
25.2.2019
CSS custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables) are becoming more and more popular. They finally reached decent browser support and are slowly making their way into various production environments. The popularity of custom properties shouldn’t come as a surprise, because they can be really helpful...
CSS Variables + calc() + rgb() = Enforcing High Contrast Colors
21.2.2019
As you may know, the recent updates and additions to CSS are extremely powerful. From Flexbox to Grid, and — what we’re concerned about here — Custom Properties (aka CSS variables), all of which make robust and dynamic layouts and interfaces easier than ever while opening up many other...
Diana Smith’s Top 5 CSS Properties She Uses to Produce CSS Art
20.2.2019
Have you seen Diana Smith's CSS drawings? Stunning. These far transcend the CSS drawings that sort of crudely replicate a flat SVG scene, like I might attempt. We were lucky enough for her to post some of her CSS drawing techniques here last year.
Well, Diana has also listed the top five...
Simple Crazy Buttons in VanillaJS (Solution to Code Challenge #15)
11.2.2019
Last week on the code challenge #15 we set out to complete a challenge on manipulating DOM properties
The Many Ways to Change an SVG Fill on Hover (and When to Use Them)
31.1.2019
SVG is a great format for icons. Vector formats look crisp and razor sharp, no matter the size or device — and we get tons of design control when using them inline.
SVG also gives us another powerful feature: the ability to manipulate their properties with CSS. As a result, we can make quick...
Slide an Image to Reveal Text with CSS Animations
29.1.2019
I want to take a closer look at the CSS animation property and walk through an effect that I used on my own portfolio website: making text appear from behind a moving object. Here’s an isolated example if you’d like to see the final product.
Here’s what we're going to work with:
See the...
Slice and Dice a Disc with CSS
13.1.2019
I recently came across an interesting sliced disc design. The disc had a diagonal gradient and was split into horizontal slices, offset a bit from left to right. Naturally, I started to think what would the most efficient way of doing it with CSS be.
Sliced gradient disc.
The first thought...
New ES2018 Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know
9.1.2019
The ninth edition of the ECMAScript standard, officially known as ECMAScript 2018 (or ES2018 for short), was released in June 2018. Starting with ES2016, new versions of ECMAScript specifications are released yearly rather than every several years and add fewer features than major editions used...
Toggling Animations On and Off
9.1.2019
A nicely detailed tutorial by Kirupa that gets into how you might provide a UI with persisted options that control whether animations run or not.
The trick is custom properties that control the movement:
body {
--toggle: 0;
--playState: "paused";
}
Which are used within animations...
Styling a Web Component
8.1.2019
This confused me for a bit here so I'm writing it out while it's fresh in mind. Just because you're using a web component doesn't mean the styles of it are entirely isolated. You might have content within a web component that is styled normally along with the rest of your website. Like this:
See...
An Initial Implementation of clip-path: path();
24.12.2018
One thing that has long surprised (and saddened) me is that the clip-path property, as awesome as it is, only takes a few values. The circle() and ellipse() functions are nice, but hiding overflows and rounding with border-radius generally helps there already. Perhaps the most useful value...
People Talkin’ Shapes
22.12.2018
Codrops has a very nice article on CSS Shapes from Tania Rascia. You might know shape-outside is for redefining the area by which text is floated around that element, allowing for some interesting design opportunities. But there are a couple of genuine CSS tricks in here:
Float shape-outside...
Google Fonts and font-display
19.12.2018
The font-display descriptor in @font-face blocks is really great. It goes a long way, all by itself, for improving the perceived performance of web font loading. Loading web fonts is tricky stuff and having a tool like this that works as well as it does is a big deal for the web.
It's such a...
A CSS Venn Diagram
17.12.2018
This is pretty wild: Adrian Roselli has made a series of rather complex Venn diagrams using nothing but CSS. With a combination of the Firefox dev inspector, plus a mixture of CSS Grid and the shape-outside property, it’s possible to do this and without a ton of hacks, too.
I also think it’s super...
Keep Math in the CSS
12.12.2018
There is a sentiment that leaving math calculations in your CSS is a good idea that I agree with. This is for math that you could calculate at authoring time, but specifically chose not to. For instance, if you needed a 7-column float-based grid (don't ask), it's cleaner and more intuitive:
.col...
Google Labs Web Components
10.12.2018
I think it's kinda cool to see Google dropping repos of interesting web components. It demonstrates the possibilities of cool new web features and allows them to ship them in a way that's compatible with entirely web standards.
Here's one: <two-up>
I wanted to give it a try, so I linked...