Link tags: properties

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I really like the idea of a shared convention for styling web components with custom properties—feels like BEM meets microformats.

CSS { In Real Life } | Quick Tip: Style Pseudo-elements with Javascript Using Custom Properties

Oh, this is smart! You can’t target pseudo-elements in JavaScript, but you can use custom properties as a proxy instead.

Fluid Space Calculator | Utopia

Type and space are linked, so if you’re going to have a fluid type calculator, it makes sense to have a fluid space calculator too. More great work from Trys and James!

Building Dark Mode | Product Blog • Sentry

Robin makes a good point here about using dark mode thinking as a way to uncover any assumptions you might have unwittingly baked into your design:

Given its recent popularity, you might believe dark mode is a fad. But from a design perspective, dark mode is exceptionally useful. That’s because a big part of design is about building relationships between colors. And so implementing dark mode essentially forced everyone on the team to think long, hard, and consistently about our front-end design components. In short, dark mode helped our design system not only look good, but make sense.

So even if you don’t actually implement dark mode, acting as though it’s there will give you a solid base to build in.

I did something similar with the back end of Huffduffer and The Session—from day one, I built them as though the interface would be available in multiple languages. I never implemented multi-language support, but just the awareness of it saved me from baking in any shortcuts or assumptions, and enforced a good model/view/controller separation.

For most front-end codebases, the design of your color system shows you where your radioactive styles are. It shows you how things are tied together, and what depends on what.

What Can You Put in a CSS Variable? / Coder’s Block

A reminder that the contens of custom properties don’t have to be valid property values:

From a syntax perspective, CSS variables are “extremely permissive”.

The failed promise of Web Components – Lea Verou

A spot-on summary of where we’ve ended up with web components.

Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers.

But then…

Somewhere along the way, the space got flooded by JS frameworks aficionados, who revel in complex APIs, overengineered build processes and dependency graphs that look like the roots of a banyan tree.

Alas, that’s true. Lea wonders how this can be fixed:

I’m not sure if this is a design issue, or a documentation issue.

I worry that is a cultural issue.

Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of npm flugelhorn, import clownshoes, build quux, all completely unapologetically because “here is my truckload of dependencies, yeah, what”.

Custom Property Coverup | Amber’s Website

This is a great bit of detective work by Amber! It’s the puzzling case of The Browser Dev Tools and the Missing Computed Values from Custom Properties.

Who do I know working on dev tools for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari that can help Amber find an answer to this mystery?

Uncommon CSS Properties

I count at least three clever CSS techniques I didn’t know about.

CSS Custom Properties Fail Without Fallback · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Matthias has a good solution for dealing with the behaviour of CSS custom properties I wrote about: first set your custom properties with the fallback and then use feature queries (@supports) to override those values.

Hybrid positioning with CSS variables and max() – Lea Verou

Yet another clever technique from Lea. But I’m also bookmarking this one because of something she points out about custom properties:

The browser doesn’t know if your property value is valid until the variable is resolved, and by then it has already processed the cascade and has thrown away any potential fallbacks.

That explains an issue I was seeing recently! I couldn’t understand why an older browser wasn’t getting the fallback I had declared earlier in the CSS. Turns out that custom properties mess with that expectation.

Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables — Sara Soueidan

Sara shares how she programmes with custom properties in CSS. It sounds like her sensible approach aligns quite nicely with Andy’s CUBE CSS methodology.

Oh, and she’s using Fractal to organise her components:

I’ve been using Fractal for a couple of years now. I chose it over other pattern library tools because it fit my needs perfectly — I wanted a tool that was unopinionated and flexible enough to allow me to set up and structure my project the way I wanted to. Fractal fit the description perfectly because it is agnostic as to the way I develop or the tools I use.

Sass Color Functions in CSS | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

I’m not the only one swapping out Sass with CSS for colour functions:

Because of the declarative nature of CSS, you’re never going to get something as terse as what you could get in Sass. So sure, you’re typing more characters. But you know what you’re not doing? Wrangling build plugins and updating dependencies to get Sass to build. What you write gets shipped directly to the browser and works as-is, now and for eternity. It’s hard to say that about your Sass code.

Global CSS options with custom properties | @mdo

This is clever—using custom properties to enable if/else logic in CSS.

Currying in CSS? | Trys Mudford

I don’t understand what currying is, but Trys points out a really interesting thing about custom properties in CSS:

The value after the : in the CSS custom property does not have to be valid CSS.

That means you can use custom properties to store arbitrary strings of text, which can then be combined within a calc() function, at which point they get evaluated.

Fluid scale and tokens: a match made in heaven - Andy Bell

Andy takes Utopia for a spin—it very much matches his approach.

Utopia

This is the project that Trys and James have been working on at Clearleft. It’s a way of approaching modular scales in web typography that uses CSS locks and custom properties to fantastic effect.

Utopia is not a product, a plugin, or a framework. It’s a memorable/pretentious word we use to refer to a way of thinking about fluid responsive design.

Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features | CSS-Tricks

It’s now easier than ever to style form controls without sacrificing semantics and accessibility:

The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the <input> tag itself. This means we can keep and style an <input> and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra <div> or <span>, to pull off a custom design.

The demo is really nice. And best of all, you can wrap all of these CSS enhancements in a feaure query:

Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to @supports.

Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2019 refresh - lynnandtonic.com

Lynn gives a step-by-step walkthrough of the latest amazing redesign of her website. There’s so much joy and craft in here, with real attention to detail—I love it!

8 DOM features you didn’t know existed - LogRocket Blog

If you ignore the slightly insulting and condescending clickbaity title, this is a handy run-down of eight browser features with good support:

1. extra arguments in addEventListener(),
2. scrollTo(),
3. extra arguments in setTimeout() and setInterval(),
4. the defaultChecked property for checkboxes,
5. normalize() and wholeText for strings of text,
6. insertAdjacentElement() and insertAdjacentText(),
7. event.detail, and
8. scrollHeight and scrollWidth.

Making Future Interfaces: Custom Properties - YouTube

Heydon cracks me up—his Patterns Day is going to have you crying with laughter; guaranteed!

Here he is talking about custom properties in CSS as part of his Making Future Interfaces video series.