Here’s what I didn’t know about :where() - Manuel Matuzović
I feel like I’m starting to understand how the CSS :where pseudo-class works and why it’s useful. The cogs are slowly turning in my brain.
Tags: select
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2022
Saturday, August 21st, 2021
Scope Proposal & Explainer
This detailed proposal from Miriam for scoping CSS is well worth reading—it makes a lot of sense to me.
Wednesday, May 26th, 2021
No, Utility Classes Aren’t the Same As Inline Styles | frontstuff
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.
Saturday, May 15th, 2021
Can I :has()
This would be such a great addition to CSS—a parent/ancestor selector!
With the combined might of :has(), :not(), nth-child(), and calc(), CSS has become a powerful language for specifying rules to account for all kinds of situations.
Monday, March 29th, 2021
CSS { In Real Life } | Quick Tip: Style Pseudo-elements with Javascript Using Custom Properties
Oh, this is smart! You can’t target pseudo-elements in JavaScript, but you can use custom properties as a proxy instead.
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021
Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence (Interconnected)
I love, love, love this experiment from Matt—messin’ around in websites!
Tuesday, December 8th, 2020
What Makes CSS Hard To Master - Tim Severien
If we, as a community, start to appreciate the complexity of writing CSS, perhaps we can ask for help instead of blaming the language when we’re confused or stuck. We might also stop looking down on CSS specialists.
Thursday, November 19th, 2020
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!
Monday, November 16th, 2020
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.
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020
aria-live
I wrote a little something recently about using ARIA attributes as selectors in CSS. For me, one of the advantages is that because ARIA attributes are generally added via JavaScript, the corresponding CSS rules won’t kick in if something goes wrong with the JavaScript:
Generally, ARIA attributes—like
aria-hidden—are added by JavaScript at runtime (rather than being hard-coded in the HTML).
But there’s one instance where I actually put the ARIA attribute directly in the HTML that gets sent from the server: aria-live.
If you’re not familiar with it, aria-live is extremely useful if you’ve got any dynamic updates on your page—via Ajax, for example. Let’s say you’ve got a bit of your site where filtered results will show up. Slap an aria-live attribute on there with a value of “polite”:
<div aria-live="polite">
...dynamic content gets inserted here
</div>
You could instead provide a value of “assertive”, but you almost certainly don’t want to do that—it can be quite rude.
Anyway, on the face it, this looks like exactly the kind of ARIA attribute that should be added with JavaScript. After all, if there’s no JavaScript, there’ll be no dynamic updates.
But I picked up a handy lesson from Ire’s excellent post on using aria-live:
Assistive technology will initially scan the document for instances of the aria-live attribute and keep track of elements that include it. This means that, if we want to notify users of a change within an element, we need to include the attribute in the original markup.
Good to know!
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020
ARIA in CSS
Sara tweeted something recently that resonated with me:
Also, Pro Tip: Using ARIA attributes as CSS hooks ensures your component will only look (and/or function) properly if said attributes are used in the HTML, which, in turn, ensures that they will always be added (otherwise, the component will obv. be broken)
Yes! I didn’t mention it when I wrote about accessible interactions but this is my preferred way of hooking up CSS and JavaScript interactions. Here’s old Codepen where you can see it in action:
[aria-hidden='true'] {
display: none;
}
In order for the functionality to work for everyone—screen reader users or not—I have to make sure that I’m toggling the value of aria-hidden in my JavaScript.
There’s another advantage to this technique. Generally, ARIA attributes—like aria-hidden—are added by JavaScript at runtime (rather than being hard-coded in the HTML). If something goes wrong with the JavaScript, the aria-hidden value isn’t set to “true”, which means that the CSS never kicks in. So the default state is for content to be displayed. There’s no assumption that the JavaScript has to work in order for the CSS to make sense.
It’s almost as though accessibility and progressive enhancement are connected somehow…
Friday, July 10th, 2020
What is CSS Specificity? Sarah Chima - Front-End Developer
An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.
Saturday, June 13th, 2020
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.
Thursday, April 23rd, 2020
Limiting input type=”color” to a certain palette (from an image) | Christian Heilmann
I never thought of combining the datalist element with input type="color"—it’s pretty cool that it just works!
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020
Selectors Explained
I can see this coming in very handy at Codebar—pop any CSS selector in here and get a plain English explanation of what it’s doing.
Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020
The CSS Cascade
This is a wonderful interactive explanation of the way CSS hierarchy works—beautiful!
Friday, December 13th, 2019
The Origin Story of Container Queries—zachleat.com
Everyone wants it, but it sure seems like no one is actively working on it.
Zach traces the earliest inklings of container queries to an old blog post of Andy’s—back when he was at Clearleft—called Responsive Containers:
For fun, here’s some made-up syntax (which Jeremy has dubbed ‘selector queries’)…
Friday, August 23rd, 2019
4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example
Thursday, April 18th, 2019
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!
Thursday, February 21st, 2019
A tiny lesson in query selection
We have a saying at Clearleft:
Everything is a tiny lesson.
I bet you learn something new every day, even if it’s something small. These small tips and techniques can easily get lost. They seem almost not worth sharing. But it’s the small stuff that takes the least effort to share, and often provides the most reward for someone else out there. Take for example, this great tip for getting assets out of Sketch that Cassie shared with me.
Cassie was working on a piece of JavaScript yesterday when we spotted a tiny lesson that tripped up both of us. The script was a fairly straightforward piece of DOM scripting. As a general rule, we do a sort of feature detection near the start of the script. Let’s say you’re using querySelector to get a reference to an element in the DOM:
var someElement = document.querySelector('.someClass');
Before going any further, check to make sure that the reference isn’t falsey (in other words, make sure that DOM node actually exists):
if (!someElement) return;
That will exit the script if there’s no element with a class of someClass on the page.
The situation that tripped us up was like this:
var myLinks = document.querySelectorAll('a.someClass');
if (!myLinks) return;
That should exit the script if there are no A elements with a class of someClass, right?
As it turns out, querySelectorAll is subtly different to querySelector. If you give querySelector a reference to non-existent element, it will return a value of null (I think). But querySelectorAll always returns an array (well, technically it’s a NodeList but same difference mostly). So if the selector you pass to querySelectorAll doesn’t match anything, it still returns an array, but the array is empty. That means instead of just testing for its existence, you need to test that it’s not empty by checking its length property:
if (!myLinks.length) return;
That’s a tiny lesson.