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Let’s take a look at how to combine the border-image property in CSS with animated SVGs that move around a border. In the process, we’ll cover how to hand-craft resizable, nine-slice animated SVGs that you can use not only re-create the effect, but to make it your own.

It’s sounding more and more likely that we’re actually going to get real container queries. Google is prototyping a syntax idea from David Baron and refined by Miriam Suzanne. Apparently, there has already been some prototyping done for a switch() syntax which is like container queries on values. Even now, there is stuff like the …

First, quickly: AWS Amplify has a new Admin UI. Amplify always had a CLI that helps you build projects by setting up stuff like auth, storage, and APIs. That’s super useful, but now, you can do those things with the new Admin UI. And more, like model your data (!!), right from a local UI. …

You might know a few ways to create charts with pure CSS. Some of them are covered here on CSS-Tricks, and many others can be found on CodePen, but I haven’t seen many examples of “area charts” (imagine a line chart with the bottom area filled in), particularly any in HTML and CSS alone. In …

Matthias Ott, comparing how painter Gerhard Richter paints (do stuff, step back, take a look) to what can be the website building process and what can wreck it: … this reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is …

We made one! It’s open source if you want to make it better or fix things. There are quite a few purpose-built fonts for writing code. The point of this site is to show you some of the nicest options so you can be aware of them and perhaps pick one out to try that …

Some HTML elements come with preset designs, like the inconveniently small squares of <input type=”checkbox”> elements, the limited-color bars of <meter> elements, and the “something about them bothers me” arrows of the <details> elements. We can style them to match the modern aesthetics of our websites while making use of their functionalities. There are also …

I first blogged about responsive data tables in 2011. When responsive web design was first becoming a thing, there were little hurdles like data tables that had to be jumped. The nature of <table> elements are that they have something a minimum width depending on the content they contain and that can easily exceed the …

Rachel Andrew introducing the fact that masonry layout is going to be a thing in native CSS via CSS grid layout. The thing with masonry is that we can already do it for the most part, but there is just one thing that makes it hard: doing the vertical-staggering and having a left-to-right source order. …

A bunch of SVG icons (of popular things) all under 1KB. SVG is awesome for golfing. I was going to add a CodePen logo but there is already one in there at 375 Bytes. I’ve got one at 208 Bytes, based on a logo update David DeSandro did for us a couple years back.

Math.random() is an API in JavaScript. It is a function that gives you a random number. The number returned will be between 0 (inclusive, as in, it’s possible for an actual 0 to be returned) and 1 (exclusive, as in, it’s not possible for an actual 1 to be returned). This is incredibly useful for …

State machines are typically expressed on the web in JavaScript and often through the popular XState library. But the concept of a state machine is adaptable to just about any language, including, amazingly, HTML and CSS. In this article, we’re going to do exactly that. I recently built a website that included a “no client …

We’ve mentioned before just how great the <details> and <summary> elements are. They’re great for quickly making accordions that are accessible to touch, mouse, and keyboard input: <details> and <summary> can even be used to play/pause gifs! Click the pause button in the top right of this image to see it in action: Neat, eh? …

AVIF, the file format based on the AV1 video codec, is the latest addition to the next-gen image formats. Early reports and comparisons show good results compared to JPEG and WebP. However, even if browser support is good, AVIF is still on the bleeding edge in regards to encoding and decoding. Encoding, decoding, settings and …

Some really refreshing technological comparison writing from Eric Bailey. Like, ya know, everything in life, we don’t have to hate or love everything. Baby bear thinking, I like to say. There are benefits and drawbacks. Every single bullet point here is well-considered and valid. I really like the first in each section, so I’ll quote …

Around eight months ago, I started building a framework which would eventually go on to become Halfmoon. I made a post on this very website announcing the launch of the very first version. Halfmoon has been billed as a Bootstrap alternative with a built-in dark mode feature, that is especially good when it comes to …

Here are the big categories of rendering websites: Client: ship a <div id=”root”></div> and let a JavaScript template render all of it. Static: pre-render the HTML. Server: let a live server process requests and generate the HTML response. They are not mutually exclusive. A website could statically pre-render 75% of it’s pages (say, blog posts), …

A web font workflow is simple, right? Choose a few nice-looking web-ready fonts, get the HTML or CSS code snippet, plop it in the project, and check if they display properly. People do this with Google Fonts a zillion times a day, dropping its <link> tag into the <head>. Let’s see what Lighthouse has to …

Some baby bear thinking from Katie Sylor-Miller: my excitement for Core Web Vitals is tempered with a healthy skepticism. I’m not yet convinced that Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are the right metrics that all sites should be measuring themselves against. I worry that the outsized emphasis placed …

I’m thoroughly convinced that SVG unlocks a whole entire world of building interfaces on the web. It might seem daunting to learn SVG at first, but you have a spec that was designed to create shapes and yet, still has elements, like text, links, and aria labels available to you. You can accomplish some of …

I’ve compared SVG and Canvas before. If you’re trying to decide between them, read that. I’d say the #1 difference between them is vector (SVG) versus raster (Canvas). But the #2 difference is how you work with them. SVG is declarative, as in, literal elements that express what they are through attributes and content. Canvas …

I like working with styled-components. They allow you write CSS in your JavaScript, keeping your CSS in very close proximity to your JavaScript for a single component. As a front-end developer who loves to dissect a web page and break it down into reusable components, the idea of styled-components brings me joy. The approach is …

The survey results from the State of CSS aren’t out yet, but they made this landing page that randomly shows you what one person wrote to answer that question. Just clicking the reload button a bunch, I get the sense that the top answers are: Container Queries Parent Selectors Nesting Something extremely odd that doesn’t …

I’m sure different people picture different things when they think about webrings, so let me clarify what I picture. I see an element on a website that: Signifies this site is part of a webring Allows you to move to the next or previous site of the webring Maybe has other functionality like going to …

Creating page content that sticks to the viewport as you scroll, something like a jump-to-anchor menu or section headings, has never been easier. Throw a position: sticky into your CSS ruleset, set the directional offset (e.g. top: 0) and you’re ready to impress your teammates with minimal effort. Check out this CSS-Tricks article to see …

I think this might be my most popular tweet of all time, but I’m not sure how to verify that these days. I’ll restate this neat little trick here because blogging is cool and fun. I used to do this a lot while debugging JavaScript: But now I do this because it’s just easier to …

Have you ever had the idea for a website or new app that involved showing news content? You don’t have to create content yourself to have the right to build an innovative news reading experience. I remember when Flipboard came out. They didn’t (and still don’t) actually produce content — they just made a fantastic …

Custom properties not only enable us to make our code more efficient, but allow us to work some real magic with CSS too. One area where they have huge potential is theming. At Atomic Smash we use Tailwind CSS, a utility class framework, for writing our styles. In this article, we’ll look at how custom …

When setting a parent element to display: flex, its child elements align left-to-right like this: Now, one of the neat things we can do with flexbox is change the direction so that child elements are stacked vertically on top of each other in a column. We can do that with the flex-direction property (or with …

There’s a small line in the changelog that is is big news for CSS: We’ve added support for CSS Conic Gradients (bug 1632351) and (bug 1175958). 🎉🎉🎉 Conic gradients are circular, just like their radial counterpart, but place color stops around the circle instead of from the center of the circle.