Dave rounds up some of the acronymtastic ways of scoping your CSS now that we’ve got a whole new toolkit at our disposal.
If your goal is to reduce specificity, new native CSS tools make reducing specificity a lot easier. You can author your CSS with near-zero specificity and even control the order in which your rules cascade.
A stylesheet for when you’re nostalgic for the old Mac OS.
Prompted by my recent post about using native button elements, Trys puts forward a simple explanation for why someone would choose to use a div instead.
The one common feature between every codebase I’ve encountered on that doesn’t use
buttons well, is a bad CSS reset. Developers try to use abutton, and find that it still looks like a native browser button, so they grab a plain old, blank canvasdiv, and build from there.
Occam’s Razor makes Trys’s explanation the most likely one.
I love this kind of spelunking into the history of why things are they way they are on the web!
Here, Detective Chief Inspector Suzanne tries to get to the bottom of why every browser has eight pixels of margin applied to the body element in the user-agent stylesheet.
Here’s the video of my opening talk at this year’s CSS Day, which I thoroughly enjoyed!
It’s an exciting time for CSS! It feels like new features are being added every day. And yet, through it all, CSS has managed to remain an accessible language for anyone making websites. Is this an inevitable part of the design of CSS? Or has CSS been formed by chance? Let’s take a look at the history—and some alternative histories—of the World Wide Web to better understand where we are today. And then, let’s cast our gaze to the future!
A stylesheet to imitate paper—perfect for low-fidelity prototypes that you want to test.
This is a smart collection of situations to consider and the CSS to resolve them. It’s all about unearthing assumptions.
This CSS reset is pleasantly minimalist and a lot of thought has gone into each step. The bit about calculating line height is very intriguing!
This is a really in-depth explanation from Bramus of the upcoming @layer rules in CSS, from the brilliant minds of Miriam, fantasai and Tab.
Basically, you’ll be able to scope styles, and you get to define the context for that scoping. So all those CSS-in-JS folks who don’t appreciate the cascade will have a mechanism to get encapsulated styles.
I can see this being very handy for big complex codebases with lots of people on the team.
This detailed proposal from Miriam for scoping CSS is well worth reading—it makes a lot of sense to me.
This is supposed to be a defence of utility classes …but it’s actually a great explanation of why classes in general are a great mechanism for styling.
I don’t think anyone has ever seriously suggested using inline styles—the actual disagreement is about how ludicrously rigid and wasteful the class names dictated by something like Tailwind are. When people criticise those classes they aren’t advocating for inline styles—they’re advocating for better class names and making more use of the power of the class selector in CSS, not less.
Anyway, if you removed every instance of the word “utility” from this article, it would still work.
Given the widespread browser support for prefers-reduced-motion now, this approach makes a lot of sense.
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!
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.
A minimal style sheet that applies some simple rules to HTML elements so you can take a regular web page and drop in this CSS to spruce it up a bit.
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.
The “Adjust CSS” slider on this delightful homepage is an effective (and cute) illustration of progressive enhancement in action.
This is a great talk by Hidde, looking at the history and evolution of cascading style sheets. Right up my alley!
Notes on the old internet, its design and frontend.
I really, really like Andy’s approach here:
The focus of the methodology is utilising the power of CSS and the web platform as a whole, with some added controls and structures that help to keep things a bit more maintainable and predictable. The end-goal is shipping as little CSS as possible—leaning heavily into progressive enhancement and modern techniques.
If you use the cascade for everything, you’re going to run into trouble. But equally, micro-managing styles on every element will also get you into trouble. I think Andy’s found a really great sweet spot here that gets the balance just right.
CUBE CSS in essence, is a progressive enhancement approach, vs a fight against the grain of CSS or a pixel-pushing your project to within an inch of its life approach.
Yes! It feels very “webby” to me.