Tags: styling

Initial thoughts on standardizing form controls | Greg Whitworth

Greg has done a lot of research into developer frustrations with customising form controls.

My current thinking in this space, and I know some folks will find this controversial, but I think we should completely standardize in-page form controls with no limitations on their styling capabilities. What do I mean by in-page controls? I am referring to any form control or component that is rendered within the content process. This standardization would include the sub-parts and their related states and how these are exposed (probably through CSS psuedo classes or HTML attributes). This will enable the shadow-dom to be encapsulated while providing web developers with a consistent experience to adjust to match their brand and needs of their site/application.

This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine.

What you see really is what you get. I like this style!

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!

BEM: 4 Hang-Ups & How It Will Help Your CSS Organization

A few common gotchas when using BEM, and how to deal with them.

Homework I Gave Web Designers - Cloud Four

This is such a great excercise for teaching the separation of structure and presentation—I could imagine using something like this at Codebar.

How to become a “Designer who Codes” – Medium

This is such excellent advice for anyone starting out in front-end development:

1. Get comfortable with the naked internet (sorry, not THAT naked internet)
2. Build yourself some nice little one-column websites
3. Learn about layout
4. Make it work on phones
5. Make it dynamic

(I would just love it if Meagan were posting this on her own incredibly beautiful website rather than on Ev’s blog.)

Proper UI hierarchy · accssible

Bringing gradients back, baby!

This is going to be a handy reference to keep on hand whenever you want a button to actually look like a button.

CSS Remedy

This is a really interesting approach that isn’t quite a CSS reset or a normalisation. Instead, it’s an experiment to reimagine what a default browser stylesheet would be like if it were created today, without concerns about backwards compatibility:

Applies basic styling to form elements and controls, getting you started with custom styling. We want to find the balance between providing a base for implementing a custom design, and allowing OS-level control over how form inputs work (like how a number pad works on iOS).

Provides a very lightweight starter file, with generic visual styling that you will want to replace. This isn’t as robust or opinionated as a starter-theme or framework. We’ve leaned toward specifying less, so you have less to override. (We haven’t defined any font families, for example.)

You can contribute by adding issues.

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.

Understanding the Albatross - Snook.ca

Jonathan shares his notes on that great flexbox container queries article from Heydon that I linked to.

The Flexbox Holy Albatross | HeydonWorks

Er …I think Heydon might’ve cracked it. And by “it”, I mean container queries.

This is some seriously clever thinking involving CSS custom properties, calc, and flexbox. The end result is a component that can respond to its container …and nary a media query in sight!

CSS doesn’t suck - Andy Bell

It’s getting exhausting spending so much of my time defending one of the three pillars of the web: CSS. It should sit equal with HTML and JavaScript to produce accessible, progressively enhanced websites and web apps that help everyone achieve what they need to achieve.

Making single color SVG icons work in dark mode

Another good reason to use the currentColor value in SVGs.

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.