CSS

You know I’m a little obsessed with :has() in CSS and how useful it is. So I’m chuffed that Ahmad Shadeed made a killer interactive guide with loads of great examples. The basics are so satisfying like “Does this <figure> have a <figcaption>? Yes? OK then style it differently.” And that can be leveled up […]

A left-and-right layout is blissfully easy with CSS grid. Something like grid-auto-rows: 1fr; will do it — just put two elements as the children. This is how I like to roll though, making two equal columns that can shrink properly: But Ryan Mulligan found a very interesting way to make it complicated in The Fifty-Fifty […]

Dropdowns, menus, tooltips, comboboxes, toasts — the popover attribute will make building a large variety of UI components easier. The popover attribute can be used on any HTML element, so you have the flexibility to choose whichever element is most appropriate semantically for each particular use case. Unlike a dialog, a popover is always non-modal […]

Eric Portis did a bang up job explaining color spaces on the web. sRGB is, as Eric puts it “the web’s dominant, default color space”, but he doesn’t spend much time on that. Thanks to recent evolutions in web tech, we have access to a wider gamut of colors (P3) and more color spaces than […]

Jake Archibald has some great examples of awkward gotchas with View Transitions. View Transitions are naturally great at tweening one state of a DOM element to the next, but you’ll see likely-unwanted ghosting if the element changes shape from one state to the next. You can either prevent it from changing shape by changing either […]

Creating unusual shapes is always a fun exercise and a good way to practice your CSS skills. One might argue that SVG is better for this job, but nowadays we have a lot of new CSS tricks that allow us to create shapes with a clean and optimized code. Through this two-article series, we will […]

I’m already a little over all the green. What was I thinking? I’m much more of a nice gray color palette kinda guy with some fun poppy colors. That’s what we need to get to here. When we left off, we just had wireframes going. It’s time to get some style on this thing! Custom […]

Jeremey Keith uses the little-used CSS property content-visibility to improve the performance on a fairly heavy page. It works a treat. I did a before-and-after check with pagespeed insights on the page for Out On The Ocean. The “style and layout” part of the main thread work went down considerably. Total blocking time went from more than 600 […]

When I think of showing off syntax highlighted code on the web, I think of code that takes in a string of code, finds relevant substrings (tokens) with elaborate RegExes, then wraps them in <span>s with classes to that color can be applied to those classes. This is quite literally how it works. The really […]

I just wrote about the <dialog> element, with some basic usage and things to watch for. It’s a great addition to the web platform. Here’s another interesting thing we can do, connecting it to another one of my favorite new things on the web platform: :has(). (You can see I’ve been pretty into it lately.) […]