Tags: css

786

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Difference between currentColor & Custom Properties | Mike Riethmuller

I had to read through this twice, but I think I get it now (I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer). Very useful if you’re doing theming in CSS.

[css-exclusions] Status of the exclusions spec #3308

Remember when I said that if we want to see CSS exclusions implemented in browsers, we need to make some noise?

Well, Rachel is taking names, so if you’ve got a use-case, let her know.

Inlining or Caching? Both Please! | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

This just blew my mind! A fiendishly clever pattern that allows you to inline resources (like critical CSS) and cache that same content for later retrieval by a service worker.

Crazy clever!

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?

It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:

In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.

Redesigning your product and website for dark mode — Stuff & Nonsense

Some advice from Andy on creating a dark theme for your website. It’s not just about the colours—there are typography implications too.

CSS and Network Performance – CSS Wizardry

Harry takes a look at the performance implications of loading CSS. To be clear, this is not about the performance of CSS selectors or ordering (which really doesn’t make any difference at this point), but rather it’s about the different ways of getting rid of as much render-blocking CSS as possible.

…a good rule of thumb to remember is that your page will only render as quickly as your slowest stylesheet.

Editorial Layouts, Floats, and CSS Grid | Rob Weychert

I remember a couple of years back when Jen came to visit Clearleft to chat to us about CSS grid, this use-case that Rob describes here came up almost immediately.

But despair not—Rachel points to a potential solution. I saw potential solution, because if we want to see this implemented in browsers, we need to make some noise.

A Book Apart, Front-End Next Steps

If you buy this bundle of books, you get Going Offline in some very, very good company.

Concise Media Queries with CSS Grid

‘Sfunny, this exact use-case (styling a profile component) came up on a project recently and I figured that CSS grid would be the right tool for the job.

The CSS Working Group At TPAC: What’s New In CSS? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel gives us the run-down on what’s coming soon to Cascading Style Sheets near you, including an aspect-ratio unit and a matches selector (as originally proposed by Lea).

CSS Border-Radius Can Do That? | IO 9elements

This is the trick that Charlotte used to get the nifty blobby effect on last year’s UX London site. Now there’s a tool to help you do the same.

Sass Selectors: To Nest Or Not To Nest? | Brad Frost

The fascinating results of Brad’s survey.

Personally, I’m not a fan of nesting. I feel it obfuscates more than helps. And it makes searching for a specific selector tricky.

That said, Danielle feels quite strongly that nesting is the way to go, so on Clearleft projects, that’s how we write Sass + BEM.

Notes on prototyping – Ben Frain

Good tips on prototyping using the very materials that the final product will be built in—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The only thing I would add is that, in my experience, it’s vital that the prototype does not morph into the final product …no matter how tempting it sometimes seems.

Prototypes are made to be discarded (having validated or invalidated an idea). Making a prototype and making something for production require very different mindsets: with prototyping it’s all about speed of creation; with production work, it’s all about quality of execution.

The Hurricane Web | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

When a storm comes, some of the big news sites like CNN and NPR strip down to a zippy performant text-only version that delivers the content without the bells and whistles.

I’d argue though that in some aspects, they are actually better than the original.

The numbers:

The “full” NPR site in comparison takes ~114 requests and weighs close to 3MB on average. Time to first paint is around 20 seconds on slow connections. It includes ads, analytics, tracking scripts and social media widgets.

Meanwhile, the actual news content is roughly the same.

I quite like the idea of storm-driven development.

…websites built for a storm do not rely on Javascript. The benefit simply does not outweigh the cost. They rely on resilient HTML, because that’s all that is really necessary here.

The Way We Talk About CSS

A very thoughtful post by Rachel…

There is frequently talk about how developers whose main area of expertise is CSS feel that their skills are underrated. I do not think we help our cause by talking about CSS as this whacky, quirky language. CSS is unlike anything else, because it exists to serve an environment that is unlike anything else. However we can start to understand it as a designed language, with much consistency. It has codified rules and we can develop ways to explain and teach it, just as we can teach our teams to use Bootstrap, or the latest JavaScript framework.

Introducing the Button element - HankChizlJaw

It’ll never catch on.

Designing With Code

How mucking about in HTML and CSS can lead to some happy accidents.

‘Sfunny, people often mention the constraints and limitations of “designing in the browser”, but don’t recognise that every tool—including Sketch and Photoshop—comes with constraints and limitations. It’s just that those are constraints and limitations that we’ve internalised; we no longer even realise they’re there.

What is Modular CSS?

A walk down memory lane, looking at the history modular CSS methodologies (and the people behind them):

CSS dismissal is about exclusion, not technology

As a community, we love to talk about meritocracy while perpetuating privilege.

This is playing out in full force in the front-end development community today.

Front-end development is a part of the field that has historically been at least slightly more accessible to women.

Shockingly, (not!) this also led to a salary and prestige gap, with back-end developers making on average almost $30,000 more than front-end.

(Don’t read the comments.)

The Complete CSS Demo for OpenType Features - OpenType Features in CSS

Every single font-feature-settings value demonstrated in one single page.