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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.

I’ve long been skeptical of quoting global browser usage percentages to justify their usage of browser features. It doesn’t matter what global usage of a browser is, other than nerdy cocktail party fodder. The usage that matters is what users on your site are using, and that can be wildly different from site to site. …

The following is a guest post written by Carlos Schults. Being able to disable code in production is a power that many developers aren’t aware of. And that’s a shame. The ability to switch off some portions—or even complete features—of the codebase can dramatically improve the software development process by allowing best practices that can …

CSS still can’t animate to auto dimensions. There is JavaScript trickery you can try. Brandon Smith outlined several techniques here a little while back. My mind always goes to this solution just because it’s so simple:

Reactivity is one of Vue’s greatest features. It is also one of the most mysterious if you don’t know what it’s doing behind the scenes. Like, why does it work with objects and arrays and not with other things, like localStorage? Let’s answer that that question, and while we’re at it, make Vue reactivity work …

Apple announced a ton of new updates at yesterday’s WWDC20 keynote address, from new hardware to updated applications. There’s lots to gawk at and enough device-envy to go around. But there’s one little line in the Safari 14 Beta release notes that caught my eye: Added WebP image support. 🎉🎉🎉

HTML has an <input type=”range”>, which is, you could argue, the simplest type of proportion slider. Wherever the thumb of that slider ends up could represent a proportion of whatever is before and whatever is after it (using the value and max attributes). Getting fancier, it’s possible to build a multi-thumb slider. But we’ve got …

Scroll-related animations have been used on the web for years. In recent years, they’ve started to become more common, perhaps in part due to devices being higher-performing and thus able to handle more animation.  There are a number of scroll related technologies out there, so this article’s aim is to provide an overview of them …

This is a neat little library. It uses SVG to insert hand-drawn looking annotations to elements (probably text), like underlines and box highlights (there are 6 design options, all configurable). Super clever.