Tags: styles

Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack | HeydonWorks

The value you want form a CSS expert is their CSS, not their JavaScript, so it’s absurd to make JavaScript a requirement.

Absolutely spot on! And it cuts both ways:

Put CSS in JS and anyone who wishes to write CSS now has to know JavaScript. Not just JavaScript, but —most likely—the specific ‘flavor’ of JavaScript called React. That’s gatekeeping, first of all, but the worst part is the JavaScript aficionado didn’t want CSS on their plate in the first place.

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.

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

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

A Tale of Two Buttons

In defence of the cascade (especially now that we’ve got CSS custom properties).

I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.

Remember, every time you set a property in CSS you are in fact overriding something (even if it’s just the default user agent styles). In other words, CSS code is mostly expressing exceptions to a default design.

StyleURL - share CSS tweaks instantly

This is an interesting tool: mess around with styles on any site inside Chrome’s dev tools, and then hit a button to have the updated styles saved to a URL (a Gist on Github).

The Accessibility of Styled Form Controls & Friends | a11y_styled_form_controls

A great collection of styled and accessible form elements:

Form controls are necessary in many interfaces, but are often considered annoying, if not downright difficult, to style. Many of the markup patterns presented here can serve as a baseline for building more attractive form controls without having to exclude users who may rely on assistive technology to get things done.

Resilient, Declarative, Contextual

This is really good breakdown of what’s different about CSS (compared to other languages).

These differences may feel foreign, but it’s these differences that make CSS so powerful. And it’s my suspicion that developers who embrace these things, and have fully internalized them, tend to be far more proficient in CSS.

How to start with variable fonts on the web – Oliver Schöndorfer

A nice intro to variable fonts.

A Guide To The State Of Print Stylesheets In 2018 — Smashing Magazine

Good advice on print styles from Rachel. The browser support situation is frustrating; I suspect it’s because the people working on browsers would rather get stuck in on shinier stuff.

Radial Gradient Recipes | CSS-Tricks

Chris takes us on a whirlwind tour of radial gradients in CSS.

:focus-visible and backwards compatibility

Patrick is thinking through a way to implement :focus-visible that’s forwards and backwards compatible.

Measuring the Hard-to-Measure – CSS Wizardry

Everything old is new again—sometimes the age-old technique of using a 1x1 pixel image to log requests is still the only way to get certain metrics.

While tracking pixels are far from a new idea, there are creative ways in which we can use them to collect data useful to developers. Once the data is gathered, we can begin to make much more informed decisions about how we work.

Silly hover effects and the future of web typography – Pixelambacht

These experiments with transitioning variable font styles on hover might be silly, but I can see the potential for some beautiful interaction design.

Shoelace.css: a back to the basics CSS starter kit

A starter kit of CSS that gives you some basic styles that you can tweak with custom properties.

For when you don’t need the whole boot.

Also:

Shoelace doesn’t ship with a grid system because you don’t need one. You should use the CSS Grid Layout instead.

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Oh No! Our Stylesheet Only Grows and Grows and Grows! (The Append-Only Stylesheet Problem) | CSS-Tricks

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.

Style Guide Guide | Style Guide Guide

If you want to understand the thinking behind this style guide guide, be sure to read Brad’s style guide guide guide.

Creating a pattern library in Sketch, Roobottom.com

A smart approach to creating patterns as symbols in Sketch. Sounds like diligence and vigilance is required to make it work, but then, that’s true of any pattern library.

There are maps for these territories | Clearleft

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.

Jeremy Keith Interview

I had a chat with Toby Osbourn over Skype. He’s writing a book all about print stylesheets so that’s we talked about.

Cascading HTML Style Sheets — A Proposal

It’s fascinating to look back at this early proposal for CSS from 1994 and see what the syntax might have been:

A one-statement style sheet that sets the font size of the h1 element:

h1.font.size = 24pt 100%

The percentage at the end of the line indicates what degree of influence that is requested (here 100%).