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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 …

When working with CSS Grid, the first thing to do is to set display: grid on the element that we want to be become a grid container. Then we explicitly define the grid using a combination of grid-template-columns, grid-template-rows, and grid-template-areas. And from there, the next step is to place items inside the grid. This …

Chris calls scroll shadows one his favorite CSS-Tricks of all time. Lea Verou popularized the pure CSS approach using four layered background gradients with some clever background-attachment magic. The result is a slick scrolling interaction that gives users a hint that additional content is available in a scrollable container. Just one problem: it broke in …

It’s no secret that MDN rolled out a new design back in March. It’s gorgeous! And there are some sweet CSS-y gems in it that are fun to look at. One of those gems is how card components handle truncated text.

URL Shorteners are tools we use to make links shorter than they actually are. With a URL Shortener, you can transform a long link (maybe for a registration form or article) into a shorter version. Behind the scenes, the long and short versions of a given link have been stored in some database. Then when …

It’s not everyday that HTML headings are the topic de jour, but my folder of saved links is accumulating articles about the recently merged removal of the document outline algorithm in the WHATWG Living Standard. First off, you should know that the algorithm never really existed. Sure, it was in the spec. And sure, there …

Michelle Barker with my favorite sorta blog post: short, practical, and leaves you with a valuable nugget for your time. Here, she gets into logical property shorthands in CSS, particularly those that set lengths just on a single axis, say only the block (vertical) axis or just the inline (horizontal) axis. I say “block” and …

Say you have a line in SVG: You can use the stroke-dasharray property in CSS to make dashes: That 5 value is a relative unit based on the size of the SVG’s viewBox. We could use any CSS length, really. But what it does is make a pattern of dashes that are 5 units long with 5 unit gaps between …

I think it’s super timely that Jim Nielsen wrote about his office space the other day. My family recently re-rooted in Colorado and I was up late last night setting up my desk and everything around it. So late, in fact, that reading these words now bites me: My workspace isn’t what life revolves around. …

Hooks are reusable functions. They allow you to use state and other features (e.g. lifecycle methods and so on) without writing a class. Hook functions let us “hook into” the React state lifecycle using functional components, allowing us to manipulate the state of our functional components without needing to convert them to class components. React …

Our dear friend Robin has a new essay called In Praise of Shadows. Now, before you hop over there looking for nuggets on CSS box shadows, text shadows, and shadow filters… this is not that. It’s an essay on photography and what Robin has learned about handing shadows with a camera. So, why share this? …

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, PHP, C++, Dart — there are so many programming languages out there and you may even be totally fluent in several of them! But as we aim to write more and better code, the way we write and communicate in everyday language becomes more and more important… and perhaps even overlooked. …

Melanie Sumner has this super-specific collection of web-related nouns for describing a group or set of something. You know how there’s a school or fish or a herd of cows? Same sort of thing, but for funny web jargon.

For this fourth and final article of our little series on single-element loaders, we are going to explore 3D patterns. When creating a 3D element, it’s hard to imagine that just one HTML element is enough to simulate something like all six faces of a cube. But  maybe we can get away with something more cube-like instead by showing only the front three sides of the shape — it’s totally …

Bunny Fonts bills itself as the “privacy-first web font platform designed to put privacy back into the internet.” According to its FAQ: With a zero-tracking and no-logging policy, Bunny Fonts helps you stay fully GDPR compliant and puts your user’s personal data into their own hands. Hard for my mind not to go straight to …

Eric Eggert: There are a few legitimate use cases for this technique. For example, you might have a table with titles and descriptions. To preserve more space for the title, you constrain the description to one line on small viewports to the one-line and you repeat the description on the detail page for this item. …

There is an abundance of both CSS and JavaScript libraries for animation libraries out there. So many, in fact, that choosing the right one for your project can seem impossible. That’s the situation I faced when I decided to build an online Solitaire game. I knew I’d need an animation library, but which was the …

Head’s up! The survey closed on July 12, 2022. We got tons of responses — thanks to everyone for helping us out! Hey, so it’s been a minute since we announced that CSS-Tricks is now part of the DigitalOcean family. Things are pretty much business as usual and hopefully it feels that way to you, …

We all make mistakes in our code. It happens! I know if I had one of those “Days Since Last Mistake” signs hanging over my desk, a big ol’ goose egg would be hovering above me all the time. It doesn’t have to be big mistakes, either. My clumsy self has committed small errors to …

Right after “Where is the best place to learn?” perhaps the most commonly asked question I hear from folks getting into code is “What web development books should I get to learn?” Well, consider this an answer to that question as I’ve curated a list of books that are not only great for getting into …

We’ve looked at spinners. We’ve looked at dots. Now we’re going to tackle another common pattern for loaders: bars. And we’re going to do the same thing in this third article of the series as we have the others by making it with only one element and with flexible CSS that makes it easy to …

We’re all familiar with the standard way of linking up a stylesheet to the <head> of an HTML doc, right? That’s just one of several ways we’re able to write CSS. But what does it look like to style things in a single-page application (SPA), say in a React project? Turns out there are several …

We’re looking at loaders in this series. More than that, we’re breaking down some common loader patterns and how to re-create them with nothing more than a single div. So far, we’ve picked apart the classic spinning loader. Now, let’s look at another one you’re likely well aware of: the dots. Dot loaders are all …

Calendars, shopping carts, galleries, file explorers, and online libraries are some situations where selectable items are shown in grids (i.e. square lattices). You know, even those security checks that ask you to select all images with crosswalks or whatever.

Well, sheesh. I opened a little can of worms when sharing Miriam’s “Am I on the IndieWeb yet?” with a short post bemoaning my own trouble getting on the IndieWeb train. But it’s a good can of worms. I think it was something like the next day after publishing that short post that David Shanske …

A diagram is a graphical representation of information that depicts the structure, relationship, or operation of anything. Diagrams enable your audience to visually grasp hidden information and engage with them in ways that words alone cannot. Depending on the type of project, there are numerous ways to use diagrams. For example, if you want to …