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A lot of chatter around the ol’ <details> and <summary> elements lately! I saw Lea Verou recently tweet an observation about the element’s display behavior and that sorta splintered into more observations and usage notes from folks, including a revived discussion on whether <summary> should be allowed to contain interactive elements or not. There are …

Using CSS, it’s possible to prevent users from selecting text within an element using user-select: none. Now, it’s understandable why doing so might be considered “controversial”. I mean, should we be disabling standard user behaviors? Generally speaking, no, we shouldn’t be doing that. But does disabling text selection have some legitimate (albeit rare) use-cases? I …

Whew boy, Safari 16 is officially out in the wild and it packs in a bunch of features, some new and exciting (Subgrid! Container Queries! Font Palettes!) and others we’ve been waiting on for better cross-browser support (Motion Path! Overscroll Behavior! AVIF!). I imagine Jen Simmons typing cheerfully writing out all of the new goodies …

You’ve probably heard a lot of hype around one of the newest kids on the framework block, Remix. It may be surprising that it got its start back in 2019, but it was originally only available as a subscription-based premium framework. In 2021, the founders raised seed funding and open sourced the framework to let …

Figma has always encouraged collaboration between developers and designers. It strives on an endless treasury of community-made plugins. Need 3D elements? There’s a plugin for that. Need abstract SVGs? There’s a plugin for that, too. That said, the design part of Figma has always been relatively static — always working with unmovable rectangles connected to each other through predefined user interactions. But …

I recently discovered the joy of creating CSS-only games. It’s always fascinating how HTML and CSS are capable of handling the logic of an entire online game, so I had to try it! Such games usually rely on the ol’ Checkbox Hack where we combine the checked/unchecked state of a HTML input with the :checked …

Browsers are constantly adding new HTML, JavaScript and CSS features. Here are some useful additions to working with forms that you might have missed…

As the name suggests, overlapping charts visualize two different sets of data in a single diagram. The idea is that the overlapping bars allow us to compare data, say, year-over-year. They are also useful for things like tracking progress for a goal where one bar represents the goal and the other shows the current amount. …

CSS-only Wolfenstein is a little project that I made a few weeks ago. It was an experiment with CSS 3D transformations and animations. Inspired by the FPS demo and another Wolfenstein CodePen, I decided to build my own version. It is loosely based on Episode 1 – Floor 9 of the original Wolfenstein 3D game. …

I started as a front-end web developer and then became a Flutter developer. I think there were some concepts that helped me adopt Flutter easier. There were also some new concepts that were different. In this article, I want to share my experience and inspire anyone feeling paralyzed with choosing one ecosystem over the other …

Those of you who have been reading CSS-Tricks for a while may remember that we used to publish a little thing we called CSS-Tricks Chronicles. Our friend Chris Coyier would write up a reflection from the past couple of months or so, and it was a great way to get a pulse on what’s happening …

A screen reader is an important accessibility tool for people with no or limited vision. People who are blind or those with low vision can use a screen reader to navigate the computer. Screen readers will read contents on the screen and explain to the user what is on the page. Screen readers allow people …

Ahmad Shadeed got an early jump on container queries and has a growing collection of examples based on everyday patterns.

We can make variables in CSS pretty easily: And we can declare them on any element:

Whenever we build simple or complex layouts using CSS Grid, we’re usually positioning items with line numbers. Grid layouts contain grid lines that are automatically indexed with positive and negative line numbers (that is unless we explicitly name them). Positioning items with line numbers is a fine way to lay things out, though CSS Grid …

Neither do I! And that’s probably because there’s a lot happening in WordPress-land. The evolution towards full-site editing (FSE) introduces frequent changes to the way we build themes and plugins, and at such break-neck speed that the documentation itself is either non-existent or nearly stale upon being published. Heck, the term “full-site editing” might even …

If a utility class only does one thing, chances are you don’t want it to be overridden by any styles coming from elsewhere. One approach is to use !important to be 100% certain the style will be applied, regardless of specificity conflicts. The Tailwind config file has an !important option that will automatically add !important …

The GOV.UK team recently published “How and why we removed jQuery from GOV.UK“. This was an insightful look at how an organization can assess its tooling and whether something is still the best tool for the job. This is not a nudge to strip libraries out of your current project right now! Many of us …

Alright, so the last time we checked in, we were using CSS Grid and combining them with CSS clip-path and mask techniques to create grids with fancy shapes. Here’s just one of the fantastic grids we made together:

That ain’t rhetorical: I’m really interested in finding great use cases for CSS multi-column layouts. The answer seems straightforward. Use columns when you want to split any content into columns, right? Here is generally the sort of example you’ll find in articles that show how CSS mutli-column layouts work, including our very own Almanac:

If the thought of handwriting code seems silly, it might surprise you to know that it’s inevitable. If you’re unsure, think about the last job interview you did, and remember how there was no computer around in the interview room — just your interviewers, a blank sheet of paper, and a blue ball-point pen. For …

In a previous article, I looked at CSS Grid’s ability to create complex layouts using its auto-placement powers. I took that one step further in another article that added a zooming hover effect to images in a grid layout. This time, I want to dive into another type of grid, one that works with shapes.

If you use VS Code, you might have enabled the setting for re-opening a previously open file next time the app launches. I do. I like that.

Designing a beautiful “article” is wrought with tons of considerations. Unlike, say, a homepage, a long-form article is less about designing an interface than it is designing text in a way that creates a relaxed and comfortable reading experience. That’s because articles deal with long-form content which, in turn, tends to be valued by a …

The time for CSS-Tricks is over. Now is the time for CSS Crimes! In this current landscape of content service providers, users are often limited to expressing themselves in text, links, and images. Sanitization rules tend to strip out HTML, JavaScript, and various attributes. Social media service Cohost allows users to have greater freedom with …

Creating a grid of images is easy, thanks to CSS Grid. But making the grid do fancy things after the images have been placed can be tricky to pull off. Say you want to add some fancy hover effect to the images where they grow and zoom beyond the rows and columns where they sit? …

CSS Scroll Snap allows websites to snap the web page or any other scroll container to a specific scroll position when the user performs a scrolling operation. This feature has been supported in all modern browsers for over two years, but many websites that could benefit from it are still not using it. Scroll snapping …

Apple unveiled an expanded version of its San Francisco system font at WWDC 2022. Then, last month, Jim Nielsen zeroed in on the font’s variations, explaining how the font provides a spectrum of variations based on the width and weight. It’s a remarkable read if you haven’t checked it.

With speech interfaces becoming more of a thing, it’s worth exploring some of the things we can do with speech interactions. Like, what if we could say something and have that transcribed and pumped out as a downloadable PDF? Well, spoiler alert: we absolutely can do that! There are libraries and frameworks we can cobble …

Dave Rupert with some modern CSS magic that tackles one of those classic conundrums: what happens when the CSS for component is unable to handle the content we throw at it? The specific situation is when a layout grid expects an even number of items, but is supplied with an odd number instead. We’re left …