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If you follow new developments in CSS, you’ve likely heard of the impending arrival of container queries. We’re going to look at the basics here, but if you’d like another look, check out Una’s “Next Gen CSS: @container” article. After we have a poke at the basics ourselves, we’re going to build something super fun …

Here’s some hardcore deep-dive CSS nerdery from PPK. If you can wrap your mind around min-content (the smallest an element can be based on the content it contains) and max-content (the largest the content of an element can push it) then it’s just one more little step to understanding fit-content. As PPK says, it’s shorthand …

The Public Beta of the Notion API dropped! Woot! Here’s their guide. I’ve been a Notion user and fan for a long time, for both personal and professional team use. They even sponsored a few videos around here a while back that are still a great representation of how I use Notion. Because Notion is …

SVGs are awesome: they are small, look sharp on any scale, and can be customized without creating a separate file. However, there is something I feel is missing in web standards today: a way to include them as an external file that also retains the format’s customization powers. For instance, let’s say you want to …

I’m afraid I have to start this with a whole backstory, as the journey here is the point, not so much the theme. A fella wrote to me a while back outlining a situation he was in. His company has a bunch of WordPress sites for public radio, many of which are essentially homes for …

Neon text can add a nice, futuristic touch to any website. I’ve always loved the magic of neon signs, and wanted to recreate them using CSS. I thought I’d share some tips on how to do it! In this article, we’re going to take a look at how to add glowing effects to text. We’ll …

Addy Osmani on images in HTML: The humble <img> element has gained some superpowers over the years. Given how central it is to image optimization on the web, let’s catch up on what it can do and how it can help improve user experience and the Core Web Vitals.

I see you. In the back there, behind JavaScript and React and PHP and all those “real” programming languages, I see you. And I appreciate you.

An interactive tool for learning grid syntax from Etesam Ansari. In the Learn section, it teaches you some concepts (involving multiple bits of the grid syntax) then gives you a task to complete by filling out the right syntax. I’m sharing because I think this sort of thing really clicks with people — I know Flexbox Froggy …

I’ve been thinking about social media images again. You know, the images that (can) show up when you share a link in places like Twitter, Facebook, or iMessage. You’re essentially leaving money on the table without them, because they turn a regular post with a little ol’ link in it into a post with a …

!default is a Sass flag that indicates conditional assignment to a variable — it assigns a value only if the variable was previously undefined or null. Consider this code snippet: To the Sass compiler, this line says: Assign $variable to value ‘test’, but only if $variable is not already assigned. Here’s the counter-example, illustrating the other side …

Manuel Matuzović goes line-by-line through a boilerplate HTML document. I like it. It’s a good reference and has a lot of the same type of stuff I tend to put in the main HTML template. It makes me think about how opinionated this kind of thing can be. Dang near every line! Not the DOCTYPE, …

Chen Hui Jing covers some recent movement in DevTools: Firefox’s grid inspector was pretty full-featured from the get-to and released together with CSS grid in Firefox 52. It was constantly improved upon since. Chrome added a basic grid inspector tool in Chrome 62 that let developers highlight elements using grid layout, but more robust features were only added in …

My friends at Sparkbox are doing a survey on design systems, as they do each year. Go ahead and fill it out if you please. Here are the results from last year. In both 2019 and 2020, the vibe was that design systems (both as an idea and as a real thing that real companies …

When dealing with complex CSS animations, there is a tendency to create expansive @keyframes with lots of declarations. There are a couple of tricks though that I want to talk about that might help make things easier, while staying in vanilla CSS: Multiple animations Timing functions The first one is more widely used and familiar …

Building animations can get complicated, particularly compelling animations where you aren’t just rolling a ball across the screen, but building a scene where many things are moving and changing in concert. When compelling animation is the goal, a timeline GUI interface is a long-proven way to get there. That was true in the days of …

Let’s talk about disabled buttons. Specifically, let’s get into why we use them and how we can do better than the traditional disabled attribute in HTML (e.g. <button disabled> ) to mark a button as disabled. There are lots of use cases where a disabled button makes a lot of sense, and we’ll get to …

Kitty reflected on an ancient blog post here on CSS-Tricks on how to make an animated pie timer. The old technique is still clever. The new technique is equally clever and much easier. I particularly like the steps() animation function that “flips” the “mask” from side-to-side by rotating a pseudo-element half a turn, That’s just …

How many times have you heard that (or even uttered it under your own breath)? I know I’ve heard it in conversations. I also know I’ve wondered the same thing about a product or two — hey, the idea here is super simple, let’s get a couple buddies together and make the same thing, only …

Chrome is experimenting with @container, a property within the CSS Working Group Containment Level 3 spec being championed by Miriam Suzanne of Oddbird, and a group of engineers across the web platform. @container brings us the ability to style elements based on the size of their parent container.

Like Jamstack, Netlify is coining this term. If your reaction is: great, a new thing I need to know about and learn, know that while Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR) does involve some new things, this is actually a push toward simplification and leverages ideas as old as the web is, just like Jamstack.

This is extremely fun. Jeff Lindsay has created Topframe, and writes: Anybody that knows how to mess around with HTML can now mess around with their desktop computing experience. Topframe is an open source tool that lets you customize your desktop screen using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

I find build tooling endlessly interesting, especially right now as we’re in a juicy next-gen transitional period with players like Vite, wmr, Snowpack, and esbuild. Hugh Haworth has a good run-down of the new players, and we’ve chatted on ShopTalk about them several times. I especially like it when people blog their personal journeys in moving …

I recently came across an interesting problem. I had to implement a grid of cards with a variable (user-set) aspect ratio that was stored in a –ratio custom property. Boxes with a certain aspect ratio are a classic problem in CSS and one that got easier to solve in recent years, especially since we got …

I have a real distaste for this question. It might seem like a fun question to dig into on the surface, but the way it enters public discourse rarely seems to be in good faith. There are ulterior motives at play involving respect, protective emotions, and desires to break or maintain the status quo.

These are a few great links about typography that have been burning a hole in my saved bookmarks folder that I’m just now getting around to sharing. There’s good stuff in there, from how to choose typefaces for app design to ideas for how to fix the concept of font sizing in CSS.

While I’m 85% certain you’ve seen and used Can I Use…, I bet there is only a 13% chance that you’ve seen and used Can I Email…. It’s the same vibe—detailed support information for web platform features—except instead of support information for web browsers, it is email clients. Campaign Monitor has maintained a guide for …

Route53 is DNS management service by AWS. DNS is absolutely not a database, and yet here’s Nicholas Martin writing up some very clever trickery originally done by Corey Quinn: When you think about it, DNS configuration is actually a very rudimentary NoSQL database. You can view and modify it at any time quite easily through …

It’s easy to forget that, as a search engine, Google doesn’t just compare keywords to generate search results. Google knows that if people don’t enjoy their experience on a web page, they won’t stay on the page long enough to consume the content — no matter how relevant it is. As a result, Google has …

There is an increasing number of “custom” features on the web platform. We have custom properties (–my-property), custom elements (<my-element>), and custom events (new CustomEvent(‘myEvent’)). At one point, we might even get custom media queries (@media (–my-media)). But that’s not all! You might have missed it because it wasn’t mentioned in Google’s “New in Chrome …