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I wrote up some early thoughts on container style queries a little while back. It’s still early days. They’re already defined in the CSS Containment Module Level 1 specification (currently in Editor’s Draft status) but there’s still a couple of outstanding discussions taking place. The basic idea is that we can define a container and …

One of the main goals of the WordPress Site Editor (and, yes, that is now the “official” name) is to move basic block styling from CSS to structured JSON. JSON files are machine-readable, which makes it consumable by the JavaScript-based Site Editor for configuring a theme’s global styles directly in WordPress. It’s not all the …

I’m a sucker for anything about front-end job titles. Anselm Hannemann: CSS evolved and we’re beyond the point where everyone can just do it as a side interest. We all can learn it and build amazing stuff with it, but using it wisely and correctly in a large-scale context isn’t an easy job anymore. It …

HTML lists are boring. They don’t do much, so we don’t really think about them despite how widely used they are. And we’re still able to do the same things we’ve always done to customize them, like removing markers, reversing order, and making custom counters. There are, however, a few “newer” things — including dangers …

Well, color me this! I was griping to myself last night about just how gosh dang hard it is to read text messages in Apple Messages. You know, not the blue bubbles that you get when messaging other iPhone users. Those are iMessages. What I’m talking about are the green bubbles you get when messaging …

Well, hey check this out. Looks like there is a brand spankin’ new blog over at WordPress.org all about WordPress development. In the original proposal for the blog, Birgit Pauli-Haak writes:

BEM. Like seemingly all techniques in the world of front-end development, writing CSS in a BEM format can be polarizing. But it is – at least in my Twitter bubble – one of the better-liked CSS methodologies. Personally, I think BEM is good, and I think you should use it. But I also get why …

What I will be doing here is kind of an experiment to explore tricks that leverage a bug with the way CSS gradients handle sub-pixel rendering to create a static noise effect — like you might see on a TV with no signal.

So far, we’ve covered how to work with data from an external API in a custom WordPress block. We walked through the process of fetching that data for use on the front end of a WordPress site, and how to render it directly in the WordPress Block Editor when placing the block in content. This …

Hey folks! If you’ve been keeping up with the latest DigitalOcean news, you might be aware that we recently announced our acquisition of a company called Cloudways. In case you’re curious about what this means, we thought it might be helpful to share a short description of Cloudways and why we’re pumped to have them …

I’m often asked where to learn web development. The answer varies, of course, and we’ve published a few posts on the topic over the years, the most recent of which was Chris taking a stab at different learning paths in 2020. The answer doesn’t have to be school. But sometimes it is, and if your …

Is it Fall? Winter? I don’t know, but I woke up with snow in the front yard this morning and felt like it was time to write a little update about what’s been happening around CSS-Tricks this past month, as we’re known to do from time to time.

In this article we will be diving into the world of scrollbars. I know, it doesn’t sound too glamorous, but trust me, a well-designed page goes hand-in-hand with a matching scrollbar. The old-fashioned chrome scrollbar just doesn’t fit in as much. We will be looking into the nitty gritty details of a scrollbar and then …

After Part 1 and Part 2, I am back with a third article to explore more fancy shapes. Like the previous articles, we are going to combine CSS Grid with clipping and masking to create fancy layouts for image galleries.

Sacha Greif openly wondered whether CSS has gotten to be, you know, too big. With all the goodies that’ve shipped in browsers the past couple of years — container queries! relative color syntax! cascade layers! logical properties! ranges in media queries! individual transforms! :has() selector! — and all of what’s on the possible horizon — …

The way we write CSS for WordPress themes is in the midst of sweeping changes. I recently shared a technique for adding fluid type support in WordPress by way of theme.json, a new file that WordPress has been pushing hard to become a central source of truth for defining styles in WordPress themes that support …

“A change to overflow on replaced elements in CSS”: From Chrome 108, the following replaced elements respect the overflow property: img, video and canvas. In earlier versions of Chrome, this property was ignored on these elements. This means that an image which was earlier clipped to its content box can now draw outside those bounds if specified to do …

Web Sockets, Web Workers, Service Workers… these are terms you may have read or overheard. Maybe not all of them, but likely at least one of them. And even if you have a good handle on front-end development, there’s a good chance you need to look up what they mean. Or maybe you’re like me …

Every once in a while, the blogging zeitgiest seems to coalesce around a certain topic and it’s like the saved articles in my bookmarks folder are having a conversation. The conversation sitting in there now is all about CSS Gradients and I thought I’d link some of the more interesting pieces.

This is a continuation of my last article about “Rendering External API Data in WordPress Blocks on the Front End”. In that last one, we learned how to take an external API and integrate it with a block that renders the fetched data on the front end of a WordPress site. The thing is, we …

The Media Queries Level 4 specification has introduced a new syntax for targeting a range of viewport widths using common mathematical comparison operators, like , and =, that make more sense syntactically while writing less code for responsive web design.

We’ve spent the last two articles in this three-part series playing with gradients to make really neat image decorations using nothing but the <img> element. In this third and final piece, we are going to explore more techniques using the CSS outline property. That might sound odd because we generally use outline to draw a …

Simon Goellner (@simeydotme)’s collection of Holographic Trading Cards have captured our attention. Under the hood there is a suite of filter(), background-blend-mode(), mix-blend-mode(), and clip-path() combinations that have been painstakingly tweaked to reach the desired effect. I ended up using a little img { visibility: hidden; } in DevTools to get a better sense of …

The CSS :has() pseudo class is rolling out in many browsers with Chrome and Safari already fully supporting it. It’s often referred to it as “the parent selector” — as in, we can select style a parent element from a child selector — but there is so much more that :has() can help us solve. …

As front-end developers, we’ve wished for a lot of things over the years — ways to center things in CSS, encapsulate styles, set an element’s aspect ratio, get finer-grained control over our colors, select an element based on its children’s properties, manage layers of specificity, allow elements to respond to the width of their parents… …

Welcome to Part 2 of this three-part series! We are still decorating images without any extra elements and pseudo-elements. I hope you already took the time to digest Part 1 because we will continue working with a lot of gradients to create awesome visual effects. We are also going to introduce the CSS mask property …

I love it when there’s a sense of synergy in the blogosphere. First, I caught Nick Heer’s coverage of Meta ending support for Instant Articles, its proprietary format for stripped-down performant news articles. He also compares it to the similar demise of AMP, Google’s answer to Instant Articles. Then I came across a new one …

Before I career jumped into development, I did a bunch of motion graphics work in After Effects. But even with that background, I still found animating on the web pretty baffling. Video graphics are designed within a specific ratio and then exported out. Done! But there aren’t any “export settings” on the web. We just …

When you put something — say a regular sheet of paper — in a manilla folder, a part of that thing might peek out of the folder a little bit. The same sort of thing with a wallet and credit cards. The cards poke out just a smidge so you can get a quick glance …

By way of a post by Manuel Matuzović which is by way of a demo by Temani Afif. You’d be doing yourself a favor to read Manuel’s breakdown of all what’s happening here, but it basically works out to the equivalent of this longer syntax: