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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.

Great tutorial from Alex Trost (based on some demos, like this one, from Andy Barefoot) showcasing how, while CSS grid has straight grid lines across and down, you can place items across grid lines creating a staggered effect that looks pretty rad. Grid-like, but it appears to align to diagonal lines rather than horizontal and …

This article focuses adding WebGL effects to <image> and <video> elements of an already “completed” web page. While there are a few helpful resources out there on this subject (like these two), I hope to help simplify this subject by distilling the process into a few steps:  Create a web page as you normally would. …

GitHub Actions are like free computers. Well, there is pricing, but even free plans get 2,000 minutes a month. You write configuration files for what you want these computers to do. Those configuration files go into a repo, so typically they do things specific to that repo. I’m sure that CI/CD is vast majority of …

Chris made a few notes about Core Web Vitals the other day, explaining why measuring these performance metrics are so gosh darn important: I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make stuff smaller! And while those are …

Tracking changes is a quintessential copyediting feature for comparing versions of content. While we’re used to tracking changes in a word processing document, we actually have HTML elements capable of that. There are a lot of elements that we can use for this process. The main ones we’ll look at are <del>, <ins> and <mark>. …

It’s no secret that CSS-Tricks is a WordPress site. And as such, we like to keep things WordPress-y, like enabling the block editor and creating some custom blocks. We also rely on Jetpack for a number of things, which if you haven’t tried, is definitely worth your time as it’s become a linchpin of this …

Like how you can use the background-color property in CSS to declare a solid color background, you can use the background-image property not only to declare image files as backgrounds but gradients as well. Using CSS gradients is better for control and performance than using an actual image (of a gradient) file.

Nice little tool from Jim Raptis: CSS Background Patterns. A bunch of easy-to-customize and copy-and-paste backgrounds that use hard stop CSS gradients to make classy patterns. Not quite as flexible as SVG backgrounds, but just as lightweight.

Admission: I’ve never worked on a website that was in anything other than English. I have worked on websites that were translated by other teams, but I didn’t have much to do with it. I do, however, spend a lot of time thinking in terms of block-level and inline-level elements. It’s been a couple of …

Red + Blue = Purple… right? Is there some way to express that in CSS? Well, not easily. There is a proposal draft for a color-mix function and some degree of interest from Chrome, but it doesn’t seem right around the corner. It would be nice to have native CSS color mixing, as it would …

A table of contents is a list of links that allows you to quickly jump to specific sections of content on the same page. It benefits long-form content because it shows the user a handy overview of what content there is with a convenient way to get there. This tutorial will show you how to …

I’ve been saying for years that a pretty good icon system is just dropping in icons with inline <svg> where you need them. This is simple to do, offers full design control, has (generally) good performance, and means you aren’t smurfing around with caching and browser support stuff. Along those lines… using <img> isn’t the …

Just a little post I wrote up over at The Events Calendar blog. The idea is that a set of blocks can be grouped together in WordPress, then registered in a register_block_pattern() function that makes the group available to use as a “block pattern” in any page or post. Block patterns are becoming upper-class citizens …

Recently, I finished a sixty-day sprint where I posted hand-coded zombie themed CSS animation every day. I learned a lot, but it also took me back to film school and reminded me of so many things I learned about storytelling, cinematography, and art. Turns out that much of what I learned back then is relevant …

A great developer tool takes a painful task that would normally be a developer’s entire job, and makes it a pleasure to do. As a personal example, I’ve needed to build an image uploading experience many times in the past. I’ve hand-coded them and experienced far too much pain doing that. Then I used Filestack …

A built-in commenting system is one of the reasons people reach for WordPress (and often stay there long-term). While I do think having a comment system is compelling (and as big of a fan of building on WordPress as I am), I find the comments system on WordPress quite crusty. It needs some love! There …

In 2013, Jake Archibald introduced this cool trick of animating an SVG path to look like it’s drawing itself. It’s 2020 now, and the trick is still popular. I’ve seen it on a lot of websites I’ve visited recently. I, too, feature an animated SVG loader on my website using one of the libraries I’ll …

Earlier this year I wrote a bit about autogrowing textareas and inputs. The idea was to make a <textarea> more like a <div> so it expands in height as much as it needs to in order to contain the current value. It’s almost weird there isn’t a simple native solution for this, isn’t it? Looking …

When you apply a CSS property to an element, there’s lots of things going on under the hood. For example, let’s say we have some HTML like this: And then we write some CSS…

Jeremey reacting to Sara’s tweet, about using aria-* selectors instead of classes when the styling you are applying is directly related to the ARIA state. … this is my preferred way of hooking up CSS and JavaScript interactions. Here’s an old CodePen where you can see it in action Which is this classic matchup:

For the millionth time: We need container queries in CSS! And guess what, it looks like we’re heading in that direction. When building components for a website, you don’t always know how that component will be used. Maybe it will be render as wide as the browser window is. Maybe two of them will sit …

As quickly as I can: AWS Lambda is great: it allows you to run server-side code without really running a server. This is what “serverless” largely means. Netlify Functions run on AWS Lambda and make them way easier to use. For example, you just chuck some scripts into a folder they deploy when you push …

Totally agree with David, on CSS needing a selector to know if a position: sticky; element is doing its sticky thing or not. Ideally there would be a :stuck CSS directive we could use, but instead the best we can do is applying a CSS class when the element becomes sticky using a CSS trick and some …

Not long after HotWired launched on the web in 1994, Josh Quittner wrote an article entitled “Way New Journalism” for the publication. He was enthusiastic about the birth of a new medium. I’m talking about a sea change in journalism itself, in the way we do the work of reporting and presenting information. The change …

Okay, this is extremely neat: Josh Comeau made this great site called Operator Lookup that explains how JavaScript operators work. There are some code examples to explain what they do as well, which is pretty handy.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are crucial development practices, especially for teams. Every project is prone to error, regardless of the size. But when there is a CI/CD process set up with well-written tests, those errors are a lot easier to find and fix. In this article, let’s go through how to check …

Some baby bear thinking from Adam Silver.