There has arguably never been a better time to be working with CSS. We have so many more tools available at our disposal than even just a couple of years ago. Scroll snap, Motion Path, Level 5 Media Queries and CSS functions min(), max() and clamp() are just some of the CSS features that have got me excited in the last year or two, but even these are old-hat compared to the buzz around container queries, or LCH colours, for instance. It can be hard to keep up with the pace of change, but as a developer I would argue that one of the most important qualities to have is curiosity. That doesn’t mean instantly adopting new tools and features the second they arrive (and burning yourself out trying to keep up). It means being open to the possibility that there might be a better way of doing something, and being able to evaluate it objectively when the need arises.
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Ahmad Shadeed recently published an article where he dug into Facebook’s implementation of the border-radius property on their card components. He had noticed, upon inspecting Facebook’s CSS, that the value for border-radius seemed quite convoluted for what amounted to a value of 8px:
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In this tutorial we’ll talk through creating a three-dimensional character using Three.js, adding some simple but effective animation, and a generative colour palette.
Read it on Codrops
The new CSS accent-color property makes it quick and easy to roll out our brand colors to certain form inputs by leveraging user agent styles. In this article we’ll take a look at what it does and how to use it alongside color-scheme for simple, accessible checkboxes and radio buttons — and imagine how we might use it in the future.
Read it on Smashing Magazine
The :is() and :where() pseudo-selectors are relatively new additions to CSS, which allow us to target elements that meet the criteria in their parentheses. For example, using :is() we can target any p, h2 or ul element with a class of test:
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One of the key skills of a front-end developer is to be able to take designs and turn them into code. These designs are often presented as static mock-ups, which visualize the “ideal” experience of browsing the website.
Read it on Smashing Magazine
Over the years I’ve tried out a lot of different ways of learning CSS and JS: books, online courses, articles, video tutorials… But for me, there’s really no substitute for learning by doing. In fact, I’d do so far as to say that this is probably the best way for anyone to learn front end coding (and perhaps most other disciplines too!). That’s not to say that the above resources aren’t useful — I still use of them frequently. But I consider them supplementary to actually learning “on the job”. Here I’d like to share what’s been successful for me when learning new front end skills, and some things that might help you too.
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A few weeks ago I blogged about inspecting sizes in the browser dev tools, lamenting the lack of a way to toggle between different unit types for length values:
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Somehow it escaped my knowledge until recently that the CSS element() function is supported in Firefox. In fact, it has been for a good while (although it still needs a prefix). “What is the element() function?”, I hear you cry. It’s a way to render a HTML element as an image value for use in our CSS. The example given on MDN is using an image rendered on a <canvas> as a background image. That’s a pretty cool use case, although the CSS Paint API already allows us to create a paint worklet and use it in our CSS – check out this tutorial by Temani Afif. Perhaps that’s one reason why browser support seems to have stalled?
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I came across this website, Gridless Design recently, and it immediately struck a chord. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time — the way that the usual design process, where designers hand off static mockups based, so often, on a 12-column grid, is not fit for purpose. I know I’m far from the first person to think that way, but increasingly with the advancements in CSS layout in recent years, the design grid feels more like a hangover from print than ever. A solution to a problem that, on the web, we simply don’t have.
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Have you ever needed to build a UI where some component on the page needs to respond to elements as they’re scrolled to a certain threshold within the viewport — or perhaps in and out of the viewport itself?
Read it on Smashing Magazine
I don’t know about you, but I’ve often had a designer, looking over a site I’m developing, say something like “Can you move that five pixels to the left?”. The problem is, most of the time I’m not using pixels. It’s frustrating that despite rem or em units generally being a better choice for the web, design tools tend to favour pixels. It means that designers and developers are often speaking different languages when it comes to sizes.
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