Tags: styling

When to use CSS vs. JavaScript | Go Make Things

Chris Ferdinandi has a good rule of thumb:

If something I want to do with JavaScript can be done with CSS instead, use CSS.

Makes sense, given their differing error-handling models:

A JavaScript error can bring all of the JS on a page to screeching halt. Mistype a CSS property or miss a semicolon? The browser just skips the property and moves on. Use an unsupported feature? Same thing.

But he also cautions against going too far with CSS. Anything to do with state should be done with JavaScript:

If the item requires interaction from the user, use JavaScript (things like hovering, focusing, clicking, etc.).

‘Sfunny; I remember when we got pseudo-classes, I wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek post called :hover Considered Harmful:

Presentation and behaviour… the twain have met, the waters are muddied, the issues are confused.

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?

It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:

In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.

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).

Introducing the Button element - HankChizlJaw

It’ll never catch on.

The State of Fieldset Interoperability - Bocoup

The long-standing difficulties of styling fieldset and legend are finally getting addressed …although I’m a little shocked that the solution involves extending -webkit-appearance. I think that, at this point, we should be trying to get rid of vendor prefixes from the web once and for all, not adding to them. Still, needs must, I suppose.

CSS: A New Kind Of JavaScript | HeydonWorks

A bold proposal by Heydon to make the process of styling on the web less painful and more scalable. I think it’s got legs, but do we really need another three-letter initialism?

We waste far too much time writing and maintaining styles with JavaScript, and I think it’s time for a change. Which is why it’s my pleasure to announce an emerging web standard called CSS.

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 display: contents; Works

A really deep dive into display: contents from Ire.

Focusing on Focus Styles | CSS-Tricks

A deep dive into the :focus pseudo-class and why it’s important.

Nobody Said CSS Is Easy

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.

Frequently Asked Questions [CSS Working Group Wiki]

Rebuttals to the most oft-asked requests for browsers to change the way they handle CSS.

How I design with CSS grid

Always mark-up first. Regardless of what the kids are doing these days, I stick by my guns and start with mark-up first. A fun experiment (maybe not for you, but definitely for me) is to see how your site reads on Lynx. It does serve as a good gauge of whether the content on the site is structured properly or not.

A Sliding Nightmare: Understanding the Range Input | CSS-Tricks

Ana goes into exhaustive detail on all the differences in the shadow DOM and styling of input type="range" across browsers.

I’m totally fine with browsers providing different styling for complex UI elements like this, but I wish they’d at least provide a consistent internal structure and therefore a consistent way of over-riding the default styles. Maybe then people wouldn’t be so quick to abandon native elements like this in favour building their own UI components from scratch—the kind of over-engineering that inevitably ends up being under-engineered.

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.

Accessible Links Re:visited | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Great advice on keeping your hyperlinks accessible.

Accessible custom styled form elements - Rian Rietveld

An excellent level-headed evaluation of styling and scripting form controls, weighing up the benefits and trade-offs. The more tightly you control the appearance, the less you get to benefit from the functionality (and accessibility) that the browser gives you for free …meaning you’ve now to got to work harder to replace it.

HTML elements like check buttons, radio buttons or select options can be hard to style with CSS in a custom design. There are many workarounds for this, but are they accessible?

Two column `dl` with two lines of CSS! Thank you Grid Layout! ✿ dabblet.com

Yes! I’ve wanted this forever!

[selectors] Functional pseudo-class like :matches() with 0 specificity · Issue #1170 · w3c/csswg-drafts

A really interesting proposal from Lea that would allow CSS authors to make full use of selectors but without increasing specificity. Great thoughts in the comments too.

Inside a super fast CSS engine: Quantum CSS (aka Stylo) ★ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

Lin gives a deep dive into Firefox’s new CSS engine specifically, but this is also an excellent primer on how browsers handle CSS in general: parsing, styling, layout, painting, compositing, and rendering.

Shadow DOM: fast and encapsulated styles – Monica Dinculescu

Monica explains how Shadow DOM could be the perfect answer for scoping CSS:

We didn’t have style encapsulation, so we started naming things “the right way” with BEM, so that we didn’t accidentally stomp over each other’s styles. We wanted to be able to author CSS from inside a JavaScript component, so we started using CSS-in-JS. We needed all these tools, because “the platform” (read: the browsers that be) wasn’t there, and building these tools showed that there was a need to move forward. For style encapsulation, Shadow DOM is the platform moving forward.

Although, in a way, Shadow DOM is also another flavour of CSS-in-JS:

Before you complain that using a Shadow DOM and Web Components means that it absolutely requires JavaScript: this is true.