I think Chris is on to something here when he identifies one of the biggest issues with CSS growing out of control:
The developers are afraid of the CSS.
A handy tool with some pre-made CSS clip paths that you can then tweak to your heart’s desire.
Mike examines the real power of CSS custom properties compared to Sass variables—they can change at runtime.
I’m convinced that in almost all cases, responsive design logic should now be contained in variables. There is a strong argument too, that when changing any value, whether in a media query or an element scope, it belongs in a variable. If it changes, it is by definition a variable and this logic should be separated from design.
A great description of one of the most powerful features in CSS Grid.
This function opens the door to us being able to write much more powerful and succinct CSS by allowing us to set, as a value for a grid track, a function including both a minimum and maximum value.
A really great overview of using prefers-reduced-motion to tone down CSS animations.
This post was written by James Craig, and I’m going to take this opportunity to say a big “thank you!” to James for all the amazing accessibility work he has been doing at Apple through the years. The guy’s a goddamn hero!
My argument is relatively simple: creating a comprehensive styling mechanism for building complex user interfaces is startlingly hard, and every alternative to CSS is much worse. Like, it’s not even close.
Stylish and accessible checkboxes and radio buttons accompanied by an explanation of the CSS involved.
No images were harmed in the making of these form controls.
Charlotte has caught the CSS Grid bug. I absolutely love her step-by-step explanation—it’s really clear, and manages to be brief but thorough at the same time.
It’s time to be more experimental and push the boundaries with layouts.
A quick visual guide to CSS Grid properties and values.
I like it when organisations share their in-house coding styles. This one from Springer Nature not only has guides for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but it also has a good primer on progressive enhancement.
A great piece from Danielle on the different mental models needed for different languages. When someone describes a language—like CSS—as “broken”, it may well be that there’s a mismatch in mental models.
CSS isn’t a programming language. It’s a stylesheet language. We shouldn’t expect it to behave like a programming language. It has its own unique landscape and structures, ones that people with programming language mental maps might not expect.
I believe that this mismatch of expectation is what has led to the current explosion of CSS-in-JS solutions. Confronted with a language that seems arbitrary and illogical, and having spent little or no time exposed to the landscape, developers dismiss CSS as ‘broken’ and use systems that either sweep it under the rug, or attempt to force it into alignment with the landscape of a programming language — often sacrificing some of the most powerful features of CSS.
Neither matters all that much and you can use every method on the same project without the universe imploding.
Some interesting approaches in the comments too.
Håkon wrote his doctoral thesis on CSS …which is kinda like Einstein writing a thesis on relativity. There’s some fascinating historical insight into the creation of the standards we use today.
Comparing different ways to hide content accessibly:
There are three reasons behind hiding content in an interface, and it’s important to identify what those reasons are, as they will correlate with the appropriate technique needed to hide such content.
- Temporarily Hidden Content
- Purposefully Visually Hidden Content
- Purposefully Visual-Only Content
This is a really clear explanation of how CSS works.
A handy GUI for experimenting with CSS Grid Layout without having to recall the syntax.
Here’s a handy interface if you want to get your head around named areas in CSS Grid, also known as doing layout with ASCII art.
I’ve been digging into CSS Grid a lot during the past week, so this post from Eric is very timely. On the surface it looks like a fairly simple use case but as you read through the explanation, it starts to become clear that the underlying thinking could be used in a lot of situations.
And, yes, like Eric, I too have been bitten by the Grid bug:
I’m working on my first redesign in a dozen years. If that doesn’t give you some sense of the power of Grid, well, I just don’t know what will.
Chris rounds up the discussion that’s been happening around container queries, for and against.
Personally, I’d like to see about 100 different use cases fleshed out. If it turns out some of them can be done sans container queries, awesome, but it still seems highly likely to me that having container queries available to us would be mighty handy.
I had a chat with Toby Osbourn over Skype. He’s writing a book all about print stylesheets so that’s we talked about.