Web Development + Follow

Say you have five buttons. Each button is a step. If you click on the fourth button, you’re on step 4 of 5, and you want to display that. This kind of counting and displaying could be hard-coded, but that’s no fun. JavaScript could do this job as well. But CSS? Hmmmm. Can it? CSS …

I always get all excited when I accomplish something, but I get extra excited when I get it done and think, “well, that was easy.” As much as I enjoy fiddling with technology, I enjoy reaping the benefit of well set-up technology even more. That’s why I still get so excited about WordPress — I …

This is exactly what I love to hear from any browser vendor: When it comes to browser compatibility, there are still too many missing features and edge-case bugs. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Things can and will get better, if browser vendors can understand what is causing the most pain, and take …

It’s always notable when the world biggest CSS framework goes up a major version (it’s in alpha now). It has dropped jQuery and IE, started using some CSS custom properties, gone fully customized with form elements, started to embrace utility classes, and includes a massive icon set you can use via SVG sprite. Sweet.

I’ve always wanted to build an API, but was scared away by just how complicated things looked. I’d read a lot of tutorials that start with “first, install this library and this library and this library” without explaining why that was important. I’m kind of a Luddite when it comes to these things. Well, I …

A couple of WordPress contributors are currently looking for folks to sponsor them to work on the documentation for the WordPress block editor (often referred to as “Gutenberg”) and this is your chance to support them.

Any time I chat with a fellow web person and CSS-Tricks comes up in conversation, there is a good chance they’ll say: oh yeah, that guide on CSS flexbox, I use that all the time! Indeed that page, and it’s cousin the CSS grid guide, are among our top trafficked pages. I try to take …

Lots of fun with gradients from Bennett Feely: stars, stripes, banners, bursts… I love being able to use nice patterns with either no image requests at all, or very little SVG. Reminder: Bennett does all sorts of cool stuff. I’ve probably used Clippy about a million times.

Well boy howdy. The 13th birthday of CSS-Tricks has rolled around. A proper teenager now, howabouthat? I always take the opportunity to do a bit of a state of the union address at this time, so let’s get to it!

Creating fluid images when they stand alone in a layout is easy enough nowadays. However, with more sophisticated interfaces we often have to place images inside responsive elements, like this card: For now, let’s say this image is not semantic content, but only decoration. That’s a good use for background-image. And because in this context …

One of the things I like about Jamstack is that it’s just a philosophy. It’s not particularly prescriptive about how you go about it. To me, the only real requirement is that it’s based on static (CDN-backed) hosting. You can use whatever tooling you like. Those tools, though, tend to be somewhat new, and new …

Just had a couple of good performance links burning a hole in my pocket, so blogging them like a good little blogger.

The new design for Sidebar is lovely. I like how it goes even deeper with the sticky elements than the last design. But even more notably, Sacha Greif has been posting five links per day to Sidebar since 2012. That’s a remarkable achievement.

We expect a line to break when the text on that line reaches the parent box boundaries. We see this every time we create a paragraph, just like this one. When the parent box doesn’t have enough room for the next word in a line, it breaks it and moves down to the next line …

Hard-stop gradients are one of my favorite CSS tricks. Here, Marcel Moreau combines that idea with CSS grid to solve an issue that’s otherwise a pain in the butt. Say you have like a 300px right sidebar on a desktop layout with a unique background color. Easy enough. But then say you want that background …

“Dark mode” is defined as a color scheme that uses light-colored text and other UI elements on a dark-colored background. Dark mode, dark theme, black mode, night mode… they all refer to and mean the same thing: a mostly-dark interface rather than a mostly-light interface.

Here’s a fancy new experimental feature in Chrome! Now, we can get an overview of the CSS used on a site, from how many colors there are to the number of unused declarations… even down to the total number of defined media queries.

The title of this Sara Soueidan article speaks to me. I’m a big fan of the idea that some CSS is best applied globally, and some CSS is best applied scoped to a component. I’m less interested in how that is done and more interested in just seeing that conceptual approach used in some fashion. …

One of the challenges we face when implementing class-based atomic styling is that it often depends on a specific breakpoint for context. We can prefix each breakpoint. This works well until we start adding multiple classes. That’s when it becomes difficult to keep a track what relates to what and where to add, remove. or change stuff.

Ethan: I’ve been working with Aquent Gymnasium to produce a series of five short tutorial videos, which have been launching over the course of this past week. Since the last video just went live, I’m thrilled to share the whole list with you: • Introduction to using VoiceOver on macOS• Designing beautiful focus states• Flexible and accessible …

Recently, CSS has added a lot of new cool features such as custom properties and new functions. While these things can make our lives a lot easier, they can also end up interacting with preprocessors, like Sass, in funny ways. So this is going to be a post about the issues I’ve encountered, how I …

Two things that strike me often about the web are how many ways there are to go about the same thing and how many considerations go into even the most seemingly simple things. Working with wrapper elements is definitely on both those lists. Wrappers (or containers or whatever) are so common — especially when establishing …

Ya know, for a site called “CSS-Tricks” that I’ve run for well over a decade, it’s a little funny we’ve never done a book under that name. I’ve written a book about WordPress and SVG, but never CSS! Well, allow me to change that. I’ve been working on a “book” called The Greatest CSS Tricks …

Sarah Higley has some CSS tricks up her sleeve for dealing with High Contrast Mode on Windows, which I learned is referred to as WHCM. Here’s the first trick: … if the default CSS outline property doesn’t give you the visual effect you want in WHCM for focus states, there’s a very simple fix. Instead …

One of my forever-lessons here on CSS-Tricks is that having your own website and blogging on it is a good idea. It’s probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, as it’s been a direct source of fun, career development and, eventually, income. I always chuckle at little blogging is cool again declarations from …

The other day I was doom-scrolling twitter, and I saw a delightful article titled “The Case for Fussy Breakfasts.” I love food and especially breakfast, and since the pandemic hit I’ve been using my breaks in between meetings (or sometimes on meetings, shh) to make a full bacon, poached egg, vegetable plate, so I really …

This kind of SVG + CSS animation trickery is catnip to me. Mikael Ainalem shares how to draw a hamburger icon (the “three lines” thing you’re well familiar with), but then animate it in a way that is surprising and fun by controlling the SVG properties in CSS.

When should we reach for CSS grid and when should we use flexbox? Rachel Andrew wrote about this very conundrum way back in 2016: Flexbox is essentially for laying out items in a single dimension – in a row OR a column. Grid is for layout of items in two dimensions – rows AND columns. …

This was always my favorite thing in Mad magazine. One page (the inside of the back cover, I think) was covered in a zany illustration. You folded that page in thirds, covering up the middle-third of that image, and a new image would form because the illustration was designed to perfectly line up with those …

I just can’t stop opening excellent typography-related articles, which means I need to subject you to blog posts that round them up so I can clean up my open tabs.