Search
When Sass and New CSS Features Collide
29.6.2020
Recently, CSS has added a lot of new cool features such as custom properties and new functions. While these things can make our lives a lot easier, they can also end up interacting with preprocessors, like Sass, in funny ways.
So this is going to be a post about the issues I’ve encountered...
Styling Layout Wrappers In CSS
29.6.2020
Two things that strike me often about the web are how many ways there are to go about the same thing and how many considerations go into even the most seemingly simple things.
Working with wrapper elements is definitely on both those lists. Wrappers (or containers or whatever) are so common...
Book: The Greatest CSS Tricks Vol. I
29.6.2020
Ya know, for a site called “CSS-Tricks” that I’ve run for well over a decade, it’s a little funny we’ve never done a book under that name. I’ve written a book about WordPress and SVG, but never CSS!
Well, allow me to change that. I’ve been working on...
Quick Tips for High Contrast Mode
27.6.2020
Sarah Higley has some CSS tricks up her sleeve for dealing with High Contrast Mode on Windows, which I learned is referred to as WHCM.
Here’s the first trick:
[…] if the default CSS outline property doesn’t give you the visual effect you want [in WHCM] for focus states...
The Return of the 90s Web
26.6.2020
One of my forever-lessons here on CSS-Tricks is that having your own website and blogging on it is a good idea. It’s probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, as it’s been a direct source of fun, career development and, eventually, income.
I always chuckle at little...
In Defense of a Fussy Website
26.6.2020
The other day, I was doom-scrolling Twitter and saw a delightful article titled “The Case for Fussy Breakfasts.” I love food — especially breakfast — and since the pandemic hit I’ve been using my breaks in between meetings (or, shh, sometimes in meetings) to make a full bacon, poached...
Line-Animated Hamburger Menu
26.6.2020
This kind of SVG + CSS animation trickery is catnip to me. Mikael Ainalem shares how to draw a hamburger icon (the “three lines” thing you’re well familiar with), but then animate it in a way that is surprising and fun by controlling the SVG properties in CSS.
CodePen Embed...
Grid for layout, flexbox for components
26.6.2020
When should we reach for CSS grid and when should we use flexbox? Rachel Andrew wrote about this very conundrum way back in 2016:
Flexbox is essentially for laying out items in a single dimension – in a row OR a column. Grid is for layout of items in two dimensions – rows AND columns.
Ahmad...
The Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS
25.6.2020
This was always my favorite thing in Mad magazine. One page (the inside of the back cover, I think) was covered in a zany illustration. You folded that page in thirds, covering up the middle-third of that image, and a new image would form because the illustration was designed to perfectly line...
Some Typography Links
25.6.2020
I just can’t stop opening excellent typography-related articles, which means I need to subject you to blog posts that round them up so I can clean up my open tabs.
Vistaserve is “a grass-roots web hosting initiative hailing from Thornbury, Australia. Inspired by the quirky web of...
The Analytics That Matter
25.6.2020
I’ve long been skeptical of quoting global browser usage percentages to justify their usage of browser features. It doesn’t matter what global usage of a browser is, other than nerdy cocktail party fodder. The usage that matters is what users on your site are using, and that can...
How to Disable Code: The Developer’s Production Kill Switch
25.6.2020
The following is a guest post written by Carlos Schults.
Being able to disable code in production is a power that many developers aren’t aware of. And that’s a shame. The ability to switch off some portions—or even complete features—of the codebase can dramatically improve the software development...
Hide Scrollbars During an Animation
24.6.2020
CSS still can’t animate to auto dimensions.
.dropdown {
transition: 0.2s;
height: 0;
}
.dropdown.open {
/* the height will change, but it won't animate. */
height: auto;
}
There is JavaScript trickery you can try. Brandon Smith outlined several techniques here a little while back....
How to Make localStorage Reactive in Vue
24.6.2020
Reactivity is one of Vue’s greatest features. It is also one of the most mysterious if you don’t know what it’s doing behind the scenes. Like, why does it work with objects and arrays and not with other things, like localStorage?
Let’s answer that that question, and while we’re at it, make...
WebP Image Support Coming to iOS 14
24.6.2020
Apple announced a ton of new updates at yesterday’s WWDC20 keynote address, from new hardware to updated applications. There’s lots to gawk at and enough device-envy to go around.
But there’s one little line in the Safari 14 Beta release notes that caught my eye:
Added WebP image...
Let’s Make a Multi-Thumb Slider That Calculates The Width Between Thumbs
23.6.2020
HTML has an <input type="range">, which is, you could argue, the simplest type of proportion slider. Wherever the thumb of that slider ends up could represent a proportion of whatever is before and whatever is after it (using the value and max attributes). Getting fancier, it’s possible...
An Overview of Scroll Technologies
22.6.2020
Scroll-related animations have been used on the web for years. In recent years, they’ve started to become more common, perhaps in part due to devices being higher-performing and thus able to handle more animation. 
There are a number of scroll related technologies out there, so this article’s...
Rough Notation
22.6.2020
This is a neat little library. It uses SVG to insert hand-drawn looking annotations to elements (probably text), like underlines and box highlights (there are 6 design options, all configurable). Super clever.
Here’s a little demo:
CodePen Embed Fallback
Aside from it just being cool,...
Using Custom Property “Stacks” to Tame the Cascade
22.6.2020
Since the inception of CSS in 1994, the cascade and inheritance have defined how we design on the web. Both are powerful features but, as authors, we’ve had very little control over how they interact. Selector specificity and source order provide some minimal “layering” control...
Patternico
20.6.2020
I remember searching for tutorials for making seamless patterns in Photoshop¹ all the time back in the day.
It’s fun to see this little website for building repeating patterns as its one job. It does everything you’d expect: pick a background, drag some decorations onto it and position...