Adactio: Links—Tagged with select

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.

Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence (Interconnected)

I love, love, love this experiment from Matt—messin’ around in websites!

What Makes CSS Hard To Master - Tim Severien

CSS is simple, but not easy.

If we, as a community, start to appreciate the complexity of writing CSS, perhaps we can ask for help instead of blaming the language when we’re confused or stuck. We might also stop looking down on CSS specialists.

Standardizing `select` And Beyond: The Past, Present And Future Of Native HTML Form Controls — Smashing Magazine

While a handful of form controls can be easily styled by CSS, like the button element, most form controls fall into a bucket of either requiring hacky CSS or are still unable to be styled at all by CSS.

Despite form controls no longer taking a style or technical dependency on the operating system and using modern rendering technology from the browser, developers are still unable to style some of the most used form control elements such as select. The root of this problem lies in the way the specification was originally written for form controls back in 1995.

Stephanie goes back in time to tell the history of form controls on the web, and how that history has led to our current frustrations:

The current state of working with controls on the modern web is that countless developer hours are being lost to rewriting controls from scratch, as custom elements due to a lack of flexibility in customizability and extensibility of native form controls. This is a massive gap in the web platform and has been for years. Finally, something is being done about it.

Amen!

CSS Stats

A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:

CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.

What is CSS Specificity? Sarah Chima - Front-End Developer

An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.

Striking a Balance Between Native and Custom Select Elements | CSS-Tricks

I think this a solution worthy of Solomon. In this case, the Gordian knot is the select element and its inevitable recreation in order to style it.

What if we instead deliver a native select by default and replace it with a more aesthetically pleasing one if possible? That’s where the “hybrid” select idea comes into action. It’s “hybrid” because it consists of two selects, showing the appropriate one at the right moment:

A native select, visible and accessible by default

A custom select, hidden until it’s safe to be interacted with a mouse

The implementation uses a genius combination of a hover media query and an adjacent sibling selector in CSS. It has been tested on a number of device/platform/browser combinations but more tests are welcome!

What I love about this solution is that it satisfies the stakeholders insisting on a custom component but doesn’t abandon all the built-in accessibility that you get from native form controls.

Limiting input type=”color” to a certain palette (from an image) | Christian Heilmann

I never thought of combining the datalist element with input type="color"—it’s pretty cool that it just works!

Selectors Explained

I can see this coming in very handy at Codebar—pop any CSS selector in here and get a plain English explanation of what it’s doing.

The CSS Cascade

This is a wonderful interactive explanation of the way CSS hierarchy works—beautiful!

The Origin Story of Container Queries—zachleat.com

Everyone wants it, but it sure seems like no one is actively working on it.

Zach traces the earliest inklings of container queries to an old blog post of Andy’s—back when he was at Clearleft—called Responsive Containers:

For fun, here’s some made-up syntax (which Jeremy has dubbed ‘selector queries’)…

4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design

Obey the Law of Locality

ABD: Anything But Dropdowns

Pass the Squint Test

Teach by example

Fading out siblings on hover in CSS | Trys Mudford

Well, the clever CSS techniques just keep on comin’ from Trys—I’m learning so much from him!

Use the :lang pseudo-class over the lang attribute selector for language-specific styles

This is a great explanation of the difference between the [lang] and :lang CSS selectors. I wouldn’t even have thought’ve the differences so this is really valuable to me.

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).

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.

Design Laws in Nature by Jordan Moore

A deep, deep dive into biomicry in digital design.

Nature is our outsourced research and development department. Observing problems solved by nature can help inform how we approach problems in digital design. Nature doesn’t like arbitrary features. It finds a way to shed unnecessary elements in advancing long-term goals over vast systems.

One thing I gained a stronger awareness of (simply from working with checkboxes) is that it’s important to progressively enhance UI components, so that a fancy custom one is able to fall back to the default browser styles and functionality. This way, a user can still access the UI if JavaScript or CSS fail.

Link tags: select

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