new.css
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.
Link tags: styling
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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.
This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine.
I think this is quite beautiful—no need to view source; the style sheet is already in the document.
Nils Binder’s Website
The “Adjust CSS” slider on this delightful homepage is an effective (and cute) illustration of progressive enhancement in action.
The Just in Case Mindset in CSS
Examples of defensive coding for CSS. This is an excellent mindset to cultivate!
MSEdgeExplainers/explainer.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers
This is great! Ideas for allowing more styling of form controls. I agree with the goals 100% and I like the look of the proposed solutions too.
The team behind this are looking for feedback so be sure to share your thoughts (I’ll probably formulate mine into a blog post).
CSS photo effects - a Collection by Lynn Fisher on CodePen
These wonderfully realistic photo effects from Lynn are quite lovely!
Uncommon CSS Properties
I count at least three clever CSS techniques I didn’t know about.
CSS folded poster effect
This is a very nifty use of CSS gradients!
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.
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.
CUBE CSS - Piccalilli
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.
Creating an Accessible Range Slider with CSS | a11y with Lindsey
If you want an accessible slider component, the trick isn’t to use a whole load of JavaScript. The trick is to use the native input type="range" and then figure out the CSS you need (which, alas, involves lots of vendor prefixes).
Web Typography News #43: Typesetting Moby-Dick, part 2
Great typography on the web should be designed in layers. The web is an imperfect medium, consumed by countless different devices over untold numbers of network connections—each with their own capabilities, limitations, and peculiarities. To think that you can create one solution that will look and work the same everywhere is a fantasy. To make this more than just one nice book website, the whole project and process needs to embrace this reality.
98.css - A design system for building faithful recreations of old UIs
Well, this is a fun bit of CSS. Instantly transform a web page into a blast from the past (1998, to be precise).
Chromium Blog: Updates to form controls and focus
Chromium browsers—Chrome, Edge, et al.—are getting a much-needed update to some interface elements like the progess element, the meter element, and the range, date, and color input types.
This might encourage more people to use native form controls …but until we can more accurately tweak the styling of these elements, people are still going to reach for more bloated, less accessible JavaScript-driven options. Over-engineering is under-engineering
CSS Architecture for Modern JavaScript Applications - MadeByMike
Mike sees the church of JS-first ignoring the lessons to be learned from the years of experience accumulated by CSS practitioners.
As the responsibilities of front-end developers have become more broad, some might consider the conventions outlined here to be not worth following. I’ve seen teams spend weeks planning the right combination of framework, build tools, workflows and patterns only to give zero consideration to the way they architect UI components. It’s often considered the last step in the process and not worthy of the same level of consideration.
It’s important! I’ve seen well-planned project fail or go well over budget because the UI architecture was poorly planned and became un-maintainable as the project grew.