CSS

If you’re going to fade out some text, I’m gonna call it and say the best way, while also being the easiest, is using a mask. Kilian Valkhof covered this recently, rejecting the idea of an overlay gradient, and also offering the idea of using background-clip. But mask is the clear winner. Let’s get that […]

Here’s a thing you’re sure to do in your web developer career: add form validation to a form. You can’t leave that name field blank! That doesn’t look like an email address! That quantity is too high! Forms are a part of the beating heart of the web, and especially important to business. You can’t […]

I think the styling story for Shadow DOM Web Components is not great. I’ve got what seems to me like a simple idea that would help that. Fair warning: I’m just some dude on the internet with an opinion here. I’m coming at it from an author’s perspective who has only written a handful of […]

I’m still obsessed with how awesome and powerful :has() is in CSS. Ryan Mulligan really drives it home in We can :has it all with a single Pen that offers simple, realistic UI controls for: These are things you can easily imagine on any website, and now handled here entirely without JavaScript at all.

After I wrote up my Basic CSS Processing Setup that used Lightning CSS, Michael Bishop responded saying he uses PostCSS for essentially the same thing, with a forked repo demonstrating. I think Michael has a good point that PostCSS has a built-in watcher which simplifies the setup nicely. And postcss-preset-env is very similar in spirit, […]

Credit to Stephen Shaw for the original idea, there is a decently easy way to make an auto-sizing <textarea> element. It is here. But it’s not perfect. There is a frustrating hard-to-replicate iOS bug. Plus it’s just a trick. It requires JavaScript and some pretty specific CSS to pull off. It’s awesome to see the […]

I’ve seen all the excitement about scroll-driven animations. I’m excited too. Animations that use scroll position as a timeline rather than a time-based duration is just a clever idea. It’s something that websites have been using probably-too-much JavaScript for for a long time and it’s nice to see that kind of thing move to CSS […]

Happy New Year ya’ll! While we’re all thinking about taking the opportunity to do various resets on our lives, I’ll take the opportunity to mention CSS resets. As a CSS nerd, I love looking at people’s different takes on what a modern CSS reset could or should be, like I did recently. But that doesn’t […]

Rachel Andrew, blowing my mind a bit: The align-content property from the Box Alignment spec does the job, however browsers require that you make the parent element either a flex or a grid layout. While the property was specified to work in block layout, no browser had implemented it, until now. align-content in block layout So now […]

Container queries are similar to media queries but allow you set styles based on a particular element’s current size, typically the width. This is super handy because you can write CSS in a way that gives flexibility to the layout! With @media queries, there’s a tight coupling of the styling of a component’s content and […]