In some random playing around, I saw that the ::first-letter pseudo-element is happy to match an emoji. And then initial-letter is happy to bump it up in size which feels like an easy way to make a kinda fun looking list that would survive syndication and such. Firefox doesn’t support initial-letter but whatever, it’s easily a progressive-enhancement thing. Interestingly, Safari requires -webkit-initial-letter which feels like one of the very last remaining vendor prefixes we need to think about. Even mask stuff is unprefixed now.
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The Odometer Effect (without JavaScript)
We can take a value set in an HTML attribute and use it in CSS, even extracting each individual digit in order to animate separately.