Web Standards

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 community. It’s always cool, my friends. But it is always nice to see more people pick it back up.

I enjoyed this post from Max Böck that gets into how what is old is new again. Server side rendering! Personal websites! Blogging! Heck yes.

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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 got into the article. This small joy of creating a bit of space for myself for the most important meal of the day has been meaningful to me — while everything else feels out of control, indulging in some ceremony has done a tiny part to offset the intensity of our collective situation.

It caused me to think of this “fussiness” as applied to other inconsequential joys. A walk. A bath. What about programming?

While we’re all laser-focused on shipping the newest feature with the hottest software and the best Lighthouse scores, I’ve been missing a bit of the joy on the web. Apps are currently conveying little care for UX, guidance, richness, and — well, for humans trying to communicate through a computer, we’re certainly bending a lot to… the computer.

I’m getting a little tired of the web being seen as a mere document reader, and though I do love me a healthy lighthouse score, some of these point matrixes seem to live and die more by our developer ego in this gamification than actually considering what we can do without incurring much weight. SVGs can be very small while still being impactful. Some effects are tiny bits of CSS. JS animations can be lazy-loaded. You can even dazzle with words, color, and layout if you’re willing to be a bit adventurous, no weight at all!

A few of my favorite developer sites lately have been Josh Comeau, Johnson Ogwuru and Cassie Evans. The small delights and touches, the little a-ha moments, make me STAY. I wander around the site, exploring, learning, feeling actually more connected to each of these humans rather than as if I’m glancing at a PDF of their resume. They flex their muscles, show me the pride they have in building things, and it intrigues me! These small bits are more than the fluff that many portray any “excess” as: they do the job that the web is intending. We are communicating using this tool- the computer- as an extension of ourselves.

Nuance can be challenging. It’s easy as programmers to get stuck in absolutes, and one of these of late has been that if you’re having any bit of fun, any bit of style, that must mean it’s “not useful.” Honestly, I’d make the case that the opposite is true. Emotions attach to the limbic system, making memories easier to recall. If your site is a flat bit of text, how will anyone remember it?

Don’t you want to build the site that teams in companies the world over remember and cite as an inspiration? I’ve been at four different companies where people have mentioned Stripe as a site they would aspire to be like. Stripe took chances. Stripe told stories. Stripe engaged the imagination of developers, spoke directly to us.

I’m sad acknowledging the irony that after thinking about how spot on Stripe was, most of those companies ignored much of what they learned while exploring it. Any creativity, risk, and intention was slowly, piece by piece, chipped away by the drumbeat of “usefulness,” missing the forest for the trees.

When a site is done with care and excitement you can tell. You feel it as you visit, the hum of intention. The craft, the cohesiveness, the attention to detail is obvious. And in turn, you meet them halfway. These are the sites with the low bounce rates, the best engagement metrics, the ones where they get questions like “can I contribute?” No gimmicks needed.

What if you don’t have the time? Of course, we all have to get things over the line. Perhaps a challenge: what small thing can you incorporate that someone might notice? Can you start with a single detail? I didn’t start with a poached egg in my breakfast, one day I made a goofy scrambled one. It went on from there. Can you challenge yourself to learn one small new technique? Can you outsource one graphic? Can you introduce a tiny easter egg? Say something just a little differently from the typical corporate lingo?

If something is meaningful to you, the audience you’ll gather will likely be the folks that find it meaningful, too.

The post In Defense of a Fussy Website appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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.

Ahmad Shadeed wrote a post where he gives the same advice, but from a different angle. He argues we should use grid for layout and flexbox for components:

Remember that old layout method might be perfect for the job. Overusing flexbox or grid can increase the complexity of your CSS by time. I don’t mean they are complex, but using them correctly and in the right context as explained from the examples in this article is much better.

Speaking of which, there’s so many great layout examples in this post, too.

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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 folds. The new image (and text!) was part of the joke.

Every one was a clever trick, so of course, I’m delighted to see that trick make it’s way to CSS, courtesy of Thomas Park.

I’m pretty surprised Thomas was able to do it with a single state (:hover / :active) . I would have bet a nickel that it would have needed @keyframes to adjust the 3D transforms into different positions during the animation, but it looks like multiple transitions happening (both parent and child) handle that.

If you’re in the mood for other cool CSS paper effects…

Here’s a new one from Lynn Fischer:

CodePen Embed Fallback

A classic from Mandy Michael:

CodePen Embed Fallback

And more folding from Mattia Astorino:

CodePen Embed Fallback

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The post The Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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.

Vistaserve is “a grass-roots web hosting initiative hailing from Thornbury, Australia. Inspired by the quirky web of the 90s, we allow users to create home pages, your own little sandbox on the World Wide Web, as it were.” Caitlin & Paul (I think the no-last-name thing is part of the aesthetic) wanted to get the fonts right, which meant removing anti-aliasing (the thing that makes fonts look good on screens!). CSS was no help. Turned out to be quite a journey involving literally rebuilding the fonts.

Thomas Bohm makes the point that the kerning around punctation may require special attention. For example, a question mark needing a little extra space or moving a superscript number away from butting against a letter.

You could do it manually with stuff like   or &hairsp in between characters. But I’m far too lazy for that unless I’m working on a very special piece. Personally, I just cross my fingers that the font I’m using is high quality enough to have thought of and implemented this sort of attention to detail.

I’m sure we’ve all seen, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” as a tester string for type, because it uses all the characters in the alphabet. Jonathan Hoefler created some new proofing text that is much more helpful for typographers like him.

That’s deep in the type nerd weeds there. More useful perhaps is another recent post from Jonathan on pairings. I’ve probably read dozens of posts on font pairings in my life, but this one resonates the most.

Some of the most dazzling typographic pairings — and certainly my favorites — are those that use unexpected fonts together. At left, the grey flannel suit that is Tungsten Compressed is paired with crimson silk doublet of the St. Augustin Civilité, a fiery sixteenth century typeface that demands a good foil.

If you’ve got macOS Catalina, you’ve got access to some really nice fonts you might not know about that need to be manually downloaded. Ralf Herrmann has the story on what you get:

• Font families:
  • Canela from Commercial Type in 16 styles
  • Domaine Display from Klim Type Foundry in 6 styles
  • Founders Grotesk by Klim Type Foundry in 17 styles
  • Graphik by Commercial Type in 18 styles
  • Produkt by Commercial Type in 8 styles
  • Proxima Nova by Mark Simonson Studio in 12 styles
  • Publico by Commercial Type in 12 styles
• Individual display fonts:
  • Sauber Script by TypeJockeys
  • Quotes Caps and Quotes Script by Sudtipos

You can download the fonts right from Font Book

I get Erik Kennedy’s Learn UI Design newsletter, and he mentions using Calena in it…

Overall, Canela walks this balance between the warmth of human handwriting and stately details. It makes me think of something literary, which is why I used it for project in one of the new video lessons in Learn UI Design.

Mark Boulton has a cool new site: TypeSpecimens.

Type specimens are curious objects. They aim to inspire designers. They are tools with which to make design decisions. They are also marketing material for foundries. This project will dig into specimens from these three perspectives: as artefacts made by and for font designers to evolve type culture; as tools for font users to make decisions about choosing and using type; and as effective marketing tools.

The post Some Typography Links appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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.

That idea of tracking real usage of your actual site concept has bounced around my head the last few days. And it’s not just “I can’t use CSS grid because IE 11 has 1.42% of global usage still” stuff, it’s about measuring metrics that matter to your site, no matter what they are.

Performance metrics are a big one. When you’re doing performance testing, much of it is what you would call synthetic testing. An automated browser loads your site and tracks what it finds as it loads, like the timing of a thing, the size of assets, the number of assets, etc. Synthetic information like this enters my mind when spending tons of time on performance. “I bet I can get rid of this one extra request,” I think. “I bet I can optimize this asset a little further.” And the performance tools we use report this kind of data to us readily. How big is our JavaScript bundle? What is our “Largest Contentful Paint”? What is our Lighthouse performance score? All things that are related to performance, but aren’t measuring actual user’s experience.

Let that sit for a second.

There are other analytics we can gather on a site, like usage analytics. For example, we might slap Google Analytics on a site, doing nothing but installing the generic snippet. This is going to tell us stuff like what pages are the most popular, how long people spend on the site, and what countries deliver the most traffic. Those are real user analytics, but it’s very generic analytic information.

If you’re hoping for more useful analytics data on your site, you have to think about it a little harder up front. What do you want to know? Maybe you want to know how often people use Feature X. Or you want to know how many files they have uploaded this week. Or how many messages they have sent. Or how many times they have clicked the star button. This is stuff that tells you how your site is doing. Generic analytics tracking won’t do that; you’ll have to write a little JavaScript to capture and report on those things. It takes a little effort to get the analytics you really care about.

Now apply that to performance tooling.

Rather than generic synthetic tests, why not measure things that are actually important to your specific site? One aspect to this is RUM, that is, “Real User Monitoring.” So rather than a single synthetic test being the source of all performance testing on your site, you’re tracking real users actually using the site on their actual devices. That makes a lot of sense to me, but aside from the logic of it, it unlocks some important data.

For example, one of Google’s Web Core Vitals, which are soon to affect the SEO of our pages, include a metric called First Input Delay (FID) and you have to collect data via JavaScript¹ on your page to use it.

Another Web Core Vital is “Largest Contentful Paint” which is a fascinating attempt at a more meaningful performance metric. Imagine a metric like “start render” or the first page paint. Is that interesting? Sorta. At least it is signaling to the user that something is happening (probably). Yet that first render might not be actually useful content, like the headline and body copy of a news article. So this metric makes a guess at what that useful content probably is and measures that. Very clever.

But, why guess? I get why Google has to guess. They have to measure LCP on a bazillion sites and provide generically useful measurements. But on your own site (again, where the focused analytics actually matter) we can tell performance tools which elements matter us and record when they render. Personally, I’d care about when the article itself renders on this site. With SpeedCurve’s hero rendering time, I could do something like:

<main elementtiming="article"></main> <!-- or focus on the top of the page, like the "hero" timing suggests --> <header elementtiming="hero"></header>

Now I’m measuring what matters to my site and not just generic numbers.

Similarly, FID is cool and all, but why not fire off a JavaScript event telling performance tooling when things happen that are important to your site. For example, on CodePen, we’d do that when the editor is ready to use. That’s called User Timing and it’s a dang W3C spec!

Editors.init(); performance.mark("Editors are initialized.");

These kind some-effort-required analytics are definitely better than the standard fare. Sure, a performance budget that warns you when you go over 200KB of JavaScript is great, but a performance budget that warns you when a core feature of your app isn’t ready until 1.4 seconds when your budget is 1.1 seconds is way more important.

1. I say this because I was trying to make a chart on the SpeedCurve of the three Web Core Vitals, and you can’t add FID unless you have LUX running, which is their RUM thing. Phew that was a lot of acronyms, sorry.

The post The Analytics That Matter appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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 shorten feedback cycles and increase the overall quality.

So, that’s what this post will cover: the mechanisms you can use to perform this switching off, why they’re useful and how to get started. Let’s dig in.

Why Would You Want to Disable Code?

Before we take a deep dive into feature flags, explaining what they are and how they’re implemented, you might be asking: Why would people want to switch off some parts of their codebase? What’s the benefit of doing that?

To answer these questions, we need to go back in time to take a look at how software was developed a couple of decades ago. Time for a history lesson!

The Dark Ages: Integration Hell

Historically, integration has been one of the toughest challenges for teams trying to develop software together. 

Picture several teams inside an organization, working separately for several months, each one developing its own feature. While the teams were working in complete isolation, their versions of the application were evolving in different directions. Now they need to converge again into a single, non conflicting version. This is a Herculean task. 

That’s what “integration hell” means: the struggle to merge versions of the same application that have been allowed to diverge for too long. 

Enter the Solution: Continuous Integration

“If it hurts, do it more often.” What this saying means is that there are problems we postpone solving because doing so is hard. What you often find with these kinds of problems is that solving them more frequently, before they accumulate, is way less painful—or even trivial.

So, how can you make integrations less painful? Integrate more often.

That’s continuous integration (CI) in a nutshell: Have your developers integrate their work with a public shared repository, at the very least once a day. Have a server trigger a build and run the automated test suite every time someone integrates their work. That way, if there are problems, they’re exposed sooner rather than later.

How to Handle Partially Completed Features

One challenge that many teams struggle with in CI is how to deal with features that aren’t complete. If developers are merging their code to the mainline, that means that any developments that take more than one day to complete will have to be split into several parts. 

How can you avoid the customer accessing unfinished functionality? There are some trivial scenarios with similarly trivial solutions, but harder scenarios call for a different approach: the ability to switch off a part of the code completely.

Feature Flags to the Rescue Defining Feature Flags

There are many names for the mechanisms that allow developers to switch a portion of their code off and on. Some call them “feature toggles” or “kill switches.” But “feature flags” is the most popular name, so that’s what we’ll use for the remainder of this post. So, what are feature flags?

Put simply, feature flags are techniques that allow teams to change the behavior of an application without modifying the code. In general, flags are used to prevent users from accessing and using the changes introduced by some piece of code, because they’re not adequate for production yet for a number of reasons.

Disable Code: What Are the Use Cases?

We’ll now cover some of the most common use cases for disabling code in production.

Switching Off Unfinished Features

As you’ve seen, one of the main use cases for feature flags is preventing users from accessing features that aren’t ready for use yet.

That way, programmers developing features that are more complex and take a longer time to complete aren’t prevented from integrating their work often and benefiting from it.

Enabling A/B Testing

The adoption of feature flags enables the use of several valuable practices in the software development process, one of which is A/B testing. 

A/B testing is a user experience research technique that consists of comparing two versions of a website or application to decide which one to keep. It entails randomly splitting users into two groups, A and B, and then delivering a different version of the application to each group. One group might receive the current production version, which we call the “control,” whereas the second group would receive the candidate for the new version, called the “treatment.” 

The testers then monitor the behavior of both groups and determine which of the versions achieved better results. 

Feature flags are a practical way to enable A/B testing because they allow you to quickly and conveniently change between the control and treatment versions of your application.

Enabling Canary Releases

If you deliver the new version of your app to your entire userbase at once, 100 percent of your users will be impacted if the release is bad in some way. What if you could gradually roll out the new version instead? You’d first deploy to a small subset of users, monitoring that group to detect issues. If something went wrong, you could roll it back. If everything looked fine, you could then gradually release the version for larger groups. That’s a canary release in a nutshell. It’s another powerful technique that feature flags might help with.

Customizing Features According to Users’ Preferences

It’s not uncommon to have to customize your application according to the needs of specific users, and there are several ways in which software teams can accomplish that—some more efficient, and others less so (companies that create separate branches or entire repositories for each client come to mind).

This is another area where feature flags could help, allowing teams to dynamically switch between different versions of the same functionality.

Disable Code in Production 101

How do you go about disabling code? That’s what we’re going to see now, in three increasingly sophisticated phases.

First Stage: The Most Basic Approach

We start with an approach that’s so primitive, it maybe shouldn’t be considered a feature flag at all. Consider the pseudocode below:

calculateAdditionalWorkHours(Employee employee, Date start, Date end) { // return calculateAdditionalWorkHoursSameOldWay(employee, start, end); return calculateAdditionalWorkHoursImproved(employee, start, end); }

In the code above, we’re just commenting out the old version of some method and replacing it with a new version. When we want the older version to be used, we just do the opposite. (Well, I said it was primitive.) This approach lacks one of the most fundamental properties of a feature flag—the ability to change how the application behaves without changing its code.

However, it plants the seed for more sophisticated approaches.

Second Stage: Taking the Decision Out of the Code

The previous approach didn’t allow developers to select the desired version of the feature without changing the code. Fortunately, that’s not so hard to do. First, we introduce a logical variable to determine which version we’re going to use:

calculateAdditionalWorkHours(Employee employee, Date start, Date end) { var result = useNewCalculation ? calculateAdditionalWorkHoursImproved(employee, start, end) : calculateAdditionalWorkHoursSameOldWay(employee, start, end); return result; }

Then, we use some mechanism to be able to assign the value to the variable from an external source. We could use a configuration file:

var useNewCalculation = config[newCalculation];

Passing arguments to the application might be another option. What matters is that we now have the ability to modify how the app behaves from the outside, which is a great step toward “true” feature flagging.

Keep in mind that the code examples you see are all pseudocode. Using your favorite programming language, there’s nothing stopping you from starting with this approach and taking it up a notch. You could, for instance, use classes to represent the features and design patterns (e.g., factories) to avoid if statements.

Stage 3: Full-Fledged Feature Flag Management

The previous approach might be enough when your application has only a small number of flags. But as that number grows, things start to become messy.

First, you have the issue of technical debt. Manually implemented feature flags can create terribly confusing conditional flows in your codebase. That only grows worse with new flags being introduced each day. Additionally, they might make the code harder to understand and navigate, especially for more junior developers, which is an invitation for bugs.

Another problem is that as the number of flags grows, it becomes more and more common to forget to delete old, obsolete ones.

The main problem of a homegrown approach is that it doesn’t give you an easy way to see and manage all of your flags at once. That’s why our third and final stage is a single piece of advice: Instead of rolling out your own feature flags approach, adopt a third-party feature flag management system.

Feature Flags Are a CI/CD Enabler

We’ve covered the mechanisms developers can use to disable portions of their codebase in production without having to touch the code. This capability is powerful and enables techniques such as A/B testing and canary releases, which are all hallmarks of a modern, agile-based software development process.

The names for the techniques might vary—feature flags, feature toggles, feature flipper, and so on. The way in which the techniques are implemented can also vary—from a humble if statement to sophisticated cloud-based solutions.

But no matter what you call them, you can’t overstate the benefit these mechanisms offer. They’re an enabler of Continuous Integration, which is essential for any modern software organization that wants to stay afloat.

The post How to Disable Code: The Developer’s Production Kill Switch appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

CSS still can’t animate to auto dimensions.

.dropdown { transition: 0.2s; height: 0; } .dropdown.open { /* the height will change, but it won't animate. */ height: auto; }

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:

.dropdown { transition: 0.2s; max-height: 0; } .dropdown.open { /* &#x1f389; */ max-height: 400px; }

Now we have this 400px magic number which is really not ideal. But the fact that this works and is so simple makes it extremely appealing that I use it production all the time.

But the magic number isn’t the only problem. Another problem is scrollbars.

When we set max-height: 0;, we also need overflow: hidden; to make sure the dropdown is actually hidden when it is closed. When the dropdown is open, we should probably be using overflow: auto; so that we don’t accidentally cut off content in case the natural height of the dropdown is taller than the max-height after it expands. The use of overflow: auto; solves that problem while introducing another: during the expansion, our dropdown will always have scrollbars for at least part of the expansion, even if the final expansion height doesn’t need them. That’s awkward!

CSS trickery to the rescue.

We can still use overflow: auto; on the expanded state — we’ll just override it during the animation. As we learned in the great CSS specificity battle, @keyframes have an amazing ability to override anything while they are active. Let’s use them not to animate the opening, but just for this scrollbar-hiding functionality:

.dropdown { max-height: 0; overflow: hidden; transition: max-height 1.2s ease-in-out; } .dropdown.open { overflow: auto; max-height: 400px; animation: hide-scroll 1.2s backwards; @keyframes hide-scroll { from, to { overflow: hidden; } } }

That does the trick!

CodePen Embed Fallback

Try adjusting the height to something less to see how you don’t see scrollbars during the animation but only at the end when they are needed. That causes a little bit of jerkiness when the scrollbar pops in, but that was acceptable in my case as it’s rare that it happens at all. If you absolutely wanted to stop the jerkiness, you’d probably apply a (custom) scrollbar at all times to the dropdown and perhaps adjust the styling of the scrollbar during the animation, if needed.

Credit here to Mr. Stephen Shaw of the fancy @keyframers for this trick. I yanked him in to help me figure it out while I was working on it for something on CodePen. We decided to turn the trick into a video for the CodePen channel showcasing Collab Mode, which we used to figure out the problem/solution:

The post Hide Scrollbars During an Animation appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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.

&#x1f389;&#x1f389;&#x1f389;

This excites me because WebP is a super progressive format that encodes images in lossless and lossy formats that we get with other image formats we already use, like JPEG, but at a fraction of the file size. We use WebP right here at CSS-Tricks, thanks to Jetpack and its Site Accelerator feature that serves WebP versions of the images we upload to browsers that support them. Jeremy Wagner has a great write-up on WebP and how to work with it, specifically for WordPress.

So, yes, this means WebP will be largely supported across the board (:IE-sad-trombone:) once Safari 14 ships.

This browser support data is from Caniuse, which has more detail. A number indicates that browser supports the feature at that version and up.

DesktopChromeFirefoxIEEdgeSafari3265No1814Mobile / TabletAndroid ChromeAndroid FirefoxAndroidiOS Safari81684.2-4.314.0

Even with that great support, defining fallbacks with the <picture> element is still a good idea.

<picture> <source srcset="img/cat.webp" type="image/webp"> <source srcset="img/cat.jpg" type="image/jpeg"> <img src="img/cat.jpg" alt="Alt Text!"> </picture>

Oh, and not to be completely overshadowed, Safari 14 also squeezes in some CSS goodies, like the :is() and :where() pseudo class functions, which we linked up a couple of weeks ago. Jen Simmons picked out other key features we should be excited about.

Safari 14 Beta Release Notes
• Added WebP
• Changed to derive <img> aspect ratio from size attributes
• Added :is()
• Added :where()
• Safari no longer supports Flash
• Added Safari Web Extensions
• Added Webpage Translation (Beta)

& much more: https://t.co/qO2Cy7rK4A

— Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) June 22, 2020

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Cleaning up my tabs.

• So a performance.now() sponsor asked if there was any performance-centric publication. I did not know, asked around, and found that just about the only one is the perf email newsletter. So just so you know; it’s supposed to be worth the subscription.
  (BTW: we postponed performance.now() to 2021. This year it’s just not possible to run physical events.)
• Speaking of events, Benedict Evans wrote an excellent article on the future of events. His experience is more with the huge trade shows than with our focused events, but he makes a few cogent points. Online events are quite different from physical ones (I already figured that out), but nobody yet knows how to do them properly. Instead of doing something truly online, most events just copy physical events while pointing a camera at the speaker and providing. That’s not the way forward. See also the early web that copied print. We slowly learned that it’s something quite different.
  Regardless, Krijn and I are not going to try online events. Instead we’ll wait until we can hold physical ones again; that’s where our strength lies.
  One more excellent point from the article: expensive, or even not-cheap, tickets, as well as organising and paying for your flight and hotel, serves as a selection filter, so that you end up with people who really value physical events.
  There is a lot of pent-up demand for phyiscal events, and that won’t go away, so physical events will return. Still, new forms of online events might also come out of this crisis.
• A while ago I considered writing an article about the Apple/Google initiative for somewhat-privacy-protecting Covid-tracking, and I gathered some sources. I never wrote the article, but here are the sources anyway:
  • The press release
  • Google’s simple overview
  • Specifications
  • Initial Cnet overview article
  • A rather critical look at the privacy implications. I had the idea the author was too negative, or made some assumption somewhere that was not entirely warranted, but I never actually figured out what sort of problem I felt this article had.
  • A more moderate Wired article that acknowledges possible privacy problems, and gives practical examples, one creepy neighbour and one creepy ad firm, and runs through some other problems as well. As I see it, these problems are inherent to any form of smartphone-based mass surveillance scheme.
  (To be honest, to me contact tracing apps are a sneaky way to avoid the much more expensive contact tracing by actual humans, which I suspect works much better. Also, politicians desperately want to be seen to be tech-literate, so we need an app. Absolutely, positively need an app. I mean, it’s technology, you know ...)
• A nice line of CSS Grid for you to study. I found out about auto-fill here.
• Lea takes a look at hybrid positioning (ie. switching from a fixed-like to an absolute-like positioning) in CSS, and as usual I learned a lot here as well. I had this effect on my site since 2004 or so, and I switch from fixed to absolute with JavaScript, because that was the only possibility back then. Meanwhile it turns out you can do this mostly in CSS as well. Also teaches you how to change CSS custom properties in JavaScript.
  I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t see a way of doing this in pure CSS, because at some point you have to switch from fixed to absolute, and that cannot be done in CSS alone.
• Speaking of CSS custom properties, Lea’s article and this one taught me that they in fact contain strings that do not have to be valid CSS. It’s only interpreted when it’s actually used in a CSS expression. See also this conversation with Lea and Tab, as well as this article by Jeremy that actually pushed me in to this particular rabbit hole. Thing learned!
• The Chrome team is preparing to do something about ultra-heavy ads; overview, technical details. Curious what comes of this. Something must be done on the browser side of things to clamp down on online junk; this may be a step in the right direction. Supposed to land somewhere in August.
• I am probably going to write more about monetization of resources such as this one, or front-end tools, and had a good Twitter conversation (yes! they still exist!) with Scott Wilson in particular. I gathered a few articles, but an incident with my computer made me lose most of them. Here are the two surviving ones:
  • An excellent overview of OSS business models (which I think we should take as a template for web dev monetization)
  • A more critical look at several options. Money quote (pun not intended):

    We should remember that a big part of innovation comes from developers working at organizations adopting open source software [...]. It’s these organizations that should be tasked to sustain open source software [...], especially since they depend on open source software to survive as a business.

• Very nice online presentation of excerpts from the diaries of captain DaCosta, a 16th century black Portuguese sea captain who ended up in Japan. Contains interesting details. The only thing I’m missing is bibliographical information about the full diary. If it’s translated into a language I can read I might actually pick it up.
• Have a tip for the next Linkbait? Or a comment on this one? Let me know (or here or here).

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 and tools to help choose the one that’s right for you. I’d argue that these technologies can be broken down into two broad categories: ones for specific scroll-related behaviors and ones for more generic scroll-related behaviors.

Technologies for specific scroll-related behaviors

There are a few simple native CSS scroll effects that are supported by modern browsers. In some limited use cases they can be sufficient for your scroll animation needs.

position: sticky;

If all you need is for an element to stay in the same place on scroll for a portion of the page, using position: sticky is a good option. It’s straightforward and built into modern browsers. That said, a polyfill is required for IE support and some mobile browsers. For a solid overview, check out this article by Preethi.

CodePen Embed Fallback CSS parallax

This isn’t a technology as much as a technique, but it’s pretty handy for simple parallax effects where you want different pieces of the page to move at different speeds on scroll. There’s a good write up of the technique on Alligator.io and a bunch of examples on CodePen, like this Firewatch header. The biggest downside for me is that it’s difficult to understand what values to use to set the perspective and transforms in order to get the parallax effect exactly right.

CodePen Embed Fallback CSS scroll snap points

Scroll snap points allow the browser to snap to particular scroll positions that you set after a user is done with their normal scrolling. This can be helpful for keeping certain elements in view. However, the API is still in flux so be careful to use the most up to date API and be careful about relying on it in production. This CSS-Tricks article by Max Kohler is a good place to learn about it right now.

CodePen Embed Fallback Smooth scrolling

Smooth scrolling is supported natively when jumping from section to section within a page using window.scrollTo() in JavaScript or even the scroll-behavior property in CSS. Generic smooth scrolling that smooths out mouse wheel actions is not supported natively in all browsers at this time. There are various JavaScript libraries that attempt to add smooth scroll support for the mousewheel action, but I’ve yet to find one that is bug-free and plays nicely with all other scroll technologies. Plus, smooth scrolling isn’t always good in the first place.

Technologies for generic scroll behaviors

Currently, there is no way to create or fire generic animations based on the scroll position using just CSS (though there is a proposal that could support some form of generic scroll based animations in CSS in the distant future) or to scrub through part of an animation. As such, if you want to animate elements on scroll, you’ll need to use at least some JavaScript to create the effect you want. There are two broad methods of using JavaScript to fire animations on scroll: using intersection observers and using the scroll event.

IntersectionObserver

Intersection observers are great if all you need for your animation is information related to whether or not and how much of an element is visible in the viewport. This makes them a good option for reveal animations. Even then, some things are difficult (though not impossible) using intersection observers, such as firing different animations depending on the direction an element enters the viewport. Intersection observers also aren’t very helpful if you want to do any scroll animations when an element is in between and not overlapping with the start and end points. 

Using the scroll event

Using the scroll event will give you the most freedom in controlling animations on scroll. It allows you to affect an element on scroll no matter where it is in terms of the viewport and set up starting and ending points exactly as you need for your project. 

With that being said, it can also be intense on performance if it isn’t throttled correctly and doesn’t have a convenient API to create particular behaviors. This is why it’s oftentimes helpful to use a good scrolling library that can handle the throttling for you and give you a more handy API to work with. Some can even handle a lot of the resizing issues for you!

Tools to create generic scroll behaviors

There are a few holistic scrolling libraries that attempt to give you full control over animations on scroll without you having to perform all of the calculations yourself. 

ScrollMagic

ScrollMagic provides a relatively simple API to create various effects on scroll and can be hooked into different animation libraries like GSAP and Velocity.js. However, it has become less maintained over the past few years, which lead to the creation of ScrollScene.

ScrollScene

ScrollScene is essentially a wrapper to try and make ScrollMagic and/or the intersection observer more usable. It uses a custom, more maintained version of ScrollMagic and adds additional features like video playback, scene init breakpoints, and scene duration breakpoints. It also makes use of GSAP. 

ScrollTrigger

ScrollTrigger is an official GreenSock plugin for GSAP. It has a long list of features and has the most easy to use API of any scroll library (at least to me). Using it, you can have complete control to define where your scroll animations start and end, animate anything (WebGL, canvas, SVG, DOM, whatever) on scroll, pin elements in place while the animation is running, and more. Plus it has the support of GreenSock and the GreenSock forums. 

Notable mention: Locomotive Scroll

While it doesn’t attempt to be as comprehensive of a scrolling library as the other libraries mentioned above, Locomotive Scroll is focused on providing custom smooth scrolling. You can also animate certain properties of DOM objects by adding data attributes or hook into the onscroll event to animate other types of objects. 

In summary

For some particular scroll animation effects, like sticky positioning and parallax, CSS technologies may be sufficient, at least when using a polyfill for browsers that don’t support those properties.

I generally recommend using GSAP’s ScrollTrigger because it can do everything that CSS properties can do, plus much more. ScrollTrigger will handle the browser support and calculations so that you can focus on animating!

Here’s a table covering which tools you can use to create particular effects:

ScrollTriggerLocomotive ScrollScrollSceneScrollMagicIntersection observersSmooth ScrollingCSS scroll snap pointsCSS parallaxposition: stickyPinning✅⚪️✅✅❌❌❌❌✅Parallax effects✅✅✅✅❌❌❌✅❌Scrubbing through animation with easing✅⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️❌❌⚪️❌Snaps scroll position✅⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️❌✅❌❌Dynamic Batching / Staggering✅❌✅❌✅❌❌❌❌Supports horizontal scroll effects✅✅✅✅✅✅✅✅✅

Here’s a table comparing various other aspects of scroll technology:

ScrollTriggerLocomotive ScrollScrollSceneScrollMagicIntersection observersSmooth scrollingCSS scroll snap pointsCSS parallaxposition: stickyUsable in production (good browser support)✅⚪️✅✅⚪️⚪️⚪️✅⚪️Complete freedom in animation✅⚪️✅✅❌❌❌❌❌Maintained✅✅✅❌n/an/an/an/an/aWorks with DOM, Canvas, WebGl, SVG✅⚪️✅✅✅❌❌❌❌Works easily with resizing✅✅✅⚪️✅✅✅✅✅Restricts animation to relevant section✅❌⚪️⚪️✅✅✅❌✅Directionally aware✅⚪️✅✅⚪️❌❌❌❌Native technology❌❌❌❌✅✅✅✅✅✅ = Yes
⚪️ = Partial support
❌ = No

The post An Overview of Scroll Technologies appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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.

Here’s a little demo:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Aside from it just being cool, I really like how it was released. You can use it from npm. It’s ready to be used via ES6 imports. You can just use it as a <script src>. Then, if you happen to be using a JavaScript framework, there are wrappers for React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and Web Components. Nice.

Not all projects take that approach. Here’s another very cool project: gooey-react. It takes the gooey effect concept and essentially gives it an API via React/JSX.

Again, this is very cool and clever and I love it — but imagine another approach instead, perhaps an HTML wrapper with data-* attributes to control the effect. With that, wrappers could be (easily?) made in any JavaScript framework.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post Rough Notation appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Since the inception of CSS in 1994, the cascade and inheritance have defined how we design on the web. Both are powerful features but, as authors, we’ve had very little control over how they interact. Selector specificity and source order provide some minimal “layering” control, without a lot of nuance — and inheritance requires an unbroken lineage. Now, CSS Custom Properties allow us to manage and control both cascade and inheritance in new ways.

I want to show you how I’ve used Custom Property “stacks” to solve some of the common issues people face in the cascade: from scoped component styles, to more explicit layering of intents.

A quick intro to Custom Properties

The same way browsers have defined new properties using a vendor prefix like -webkit- or -moz-, we can define our own Custom Properties with an “empty” -- prefix. Like variables in Sass or JavaScript, we can use them to name, store, and retrieve values — but like other properties in CSS, they cascade and inherit with the DOM.

/* Define a custom property */ html { --brand-color: rebeccapurple; }

In order to access those captured values, we use the var() function. It has two parts: first the name of our custom property, and then a fallback in case that property is undefined:

button { /* use the --brand-color if available, or fall back to deeppink */ background: var(--brand-color, deeppink); }

This is not a support fallback for old browsers. If a browser doesn’t understand custom properties, it will ignore the entire var() declaration. Instead, this is a built-in way of handling undefined variables, similar to a font stack defining fallback font families when one is unavailable. If we don’t provide a fallback, the default is unset.

Building variable “stacks”

This ability to define a fallback is similar to “font stacks” used on the font-family property. If the first family is unavailable, the second will be used, and so on. The var() function only accepts a single fallback, but we can nest var() functions to create custom-property fallback “stacks” of any size:

button { /* try Consolas, then Menlo, then Monaco, and finally monospace */ font-family: Consolas, Menlo, Monaco, monospace; /* try --state, then --button-color, then --brand-color, and finally deeppink */ background: var(--state, var(--button-color, var(--brand-color, deeppink))); }

If that nested syntax for stacked properties looks bulky, you can use a pre-processor like Sass to make it more compact.

CodePen Embed Fallback

That single-fallback limitation is required to support fallbacks with a comma inside them — like font stacks or layered background images:

html { /* The fallback value is "Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" */ font-family: var(--my-font, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif); } Defining “scope”

CSS selectors allow us to drill down into the HTML DOM tree, and style elements anywhere on the page, or elements in a particular nested context.

/* all links */ a { color: slateblue; } /* only links inside a section */ section a { color: rebeccapurple; } /* only links inside an article */ article a { color: deeppink; }

That’s useful, but it doesn’t capture the reality of “modular” object-oriented or component-driven styles. We might have multiple articles and asides, nested in various configurations. We need a way to clarify which context, or scope, should take precedence when they overlap.

Proximity scopes

Let’s say we have a .light theme and a .dark theme. We can use those classes on the root <html> element to define a page-wide default, but we can also apply them to specific components, nested in various ways:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Each time we apply one of our color-mode classes, the background and color properties are reset, then inherited by nested headings and paragraphs. In our main context, colors inherit from the .light class, while the nested heading and paragraph inherit from the .dark class. Inheritance is based on direct lineage, so the nearest ancestor with a defined value will take precedence. We call that proximity.

Proximity matters for inheritance, but it has no impact on selectors, which rely on specificity. That becomes a problem if we want to style something inside the dark or light containers.

Here I’ve attempted to define both light and dark button variants. Light mode buttons should be rebeccapurple with white text so they stand out, and dark mode buttons should be plum with black text. We’re selecting the buttons directly based on a light and dark context, but it doesn’t work:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Some of the buttons are in both contexts, with both .light and .dark ancestors. What we want in that case is for the closest theme to take over (inheritance proximity behavior), but what we get instead is the second selector overriding the first (cascade behavior). Since the two selectors have the same specificity, source order determines the winner.

Custom Properties and proximity

What we need here is a way to inherit these properties from the theme, but only apply them to specific children. Custom Properties make that possible! We can define values on the light and dark containers, while only using their inherited values on nested elements, like our buttons.

We’ll start by setting up the buttons to use custom properties, with a fallback “default” value, in case those properties are undefined:

button { background: var(--btn-color, rebeccapurple); color: var(--btn-contrast, white); }

Now we can set those values based on context, and they will scope to the appropriate ancestor based on proximity and inheritance:

.dark { --btn-color: plum; --btn-contrast: black; } .light { --btn-color: rebeccapurple; --btn-contrast: white; }

As an added bonus, we’re using less code overall, and one unified button definition:

CodePen Embed Fallback

I think of this as creating an API of available parameters for the button component. Sara Soueidan and Lea Verou have both covered this well in recent articles.

Component ownership

Sometimes proximity isn’t enough to define scope. When JavaScript frameworks generate “scoped styles” they are establishing specific object-element ownership. A “tab layout” component owns the tabs themselves, but not the content behind each tab. This is also what the BEM convention attempts to capture in complex .block__element class names.

Nicole Sullivan coined the term “donut scope” to talk about this problem back in 2011. While I’m sure she has more recent thoughts on the issue, the fundamental problem hasn’t changed. Selectors and specificity are great for describing how we build detailed styles over top of broad patterns, but they don’t convey a clear sense of ownership.

We can use custom property stacks to help solve this problem. We’ll start by creating “global” properties on the <html> element that are for our default colors:

html { --background--global: white; --color--global: black; --btn-color--global: rebeccapurple; --btn-contrast--global: white; }

That default global theme is now available anywhere we want to refer to it. We’ll do that with a data-theme attribute that applies our foreground and background colors. We want the global values to provide a default fallback, but we also want the option to override with a specific theme. That’s where “stacks” come in:

[data-theme] { /* If there's no component value, use the global value */ background: var(--background--component, var(--background--global)); color: var(--color--component, var(--color--global)); }

Now we can define an inverted component by setting the *--component properties as a reverse of the global properties:

[data-theme='invert'] { --background--component: var(--color--global); --color--component: var(--background--global); }

But we don’t want those settings to inherit beyond the donut of ownership, so we reset those values to initial (undefined) on every theme. We’ll want to do this at a lower specificity, or earlier in the source order, so it provides a default that each theme can override:

[data-theme] { --background--component: initial; --color--component: initial; }

The initial keyword has a special meaning when used on custom properties, reverting them to a Guaranteed-Invalid state. That means rather than being passed along to set background: initial or color: initial, the custom property becomes undefined, and we fallback to the next value in our stack, the global settings.

We can do the same thing with our buttons, and then make sure to apply data-theme to each component. If no specific theme is given, each component will default to the global theme:

CodePen Embed Fallback Defining “origins”

The CSS cascade is a series of filtering layers used to determine what value should take precedence when multiple values are defined on the same property. We most often interact with the specificity layers, or the final layering based on source-order — but the first layer of cascade is the “origin” of a style. The origin describes where a style came from — often the browser (defaults), the user (preferences), or the author (that’s us).

By default, author styles override user preferences, which override browser defaults. That changes when anyone applies `!important` to a style, and the origins reverse: browser `!important` styles have the highest origin, then important user preferences, then our author important styles, above all the normal layers. There are a few additional origins, but we won’t go into them here.

When we create custom property “stacks,” we’re building a very similar behavior. If we wanted to represent existing origins as a stack of custom properties, it would look something like this:

.origins-as-custom-properties { color: var(--browser-important, var(--user-important, var(--author-important, var(--author, var(--user, var(--browser)))))); }

Those layers already exist, so there’s no reason to recreate them. But we’re doing something very similar when we layer our “global” and “component” styles above — creating a “component” origin layer that overrides our “global” layer. That same approach can be used to solve various layering issues in CSS, which can’t always be described by specificity:

• Override » Component » Theme » Default
• Theme » Design system or framework
• State » Type » Default

Let’s look at some buttons again. We’ll need a default button style, a disabled state, and various button “types,” like danger, primary and secondary. We wan’t the disabled state to always override the type variations, but selectors don’t capture that distinction:

CodePen Embed Fallback

But we can define a stack that provides both “type” and “state” layers in the order that we want them prioritized:

button { background: var(--btn-state, var(--btn-type, var(--btn-default))); }

Now when we set both variables, the state will always take precedence:

CodePen Embed Fallback

I’ve used this technique to create a Cascading Colors framework that allows custom theming based on layering:

• Pre-defined theme attributes in the HTML
• User color preferences
• Light and dark modes
• Global theme defaults

Mix and match

These approaches can be taken to an extreme, but most day-to-day use-cases can be handled with two or three values in a stack, often using a combination of the techniques above:

• A variable stack to define the layers
• Inheritance to set them based on proximity and scope
• Careful application of the `initial` value to remove nested elements from a scope

We’ve been using these custom property “stacks” on our projects at OddBird. We’re still discovering as we go, but they’ve already been helpful in solving problems that were difficult using only selectors and specificity. With custom properties, we don’t have to fight the cascade or inheritance. We can capture and leverage them, as-intended, with more control over how they should apply in each instance. To me, that’s a big win for CSS — especially when developing style frameworks, tools, and systems.

The post Using Custom Property “Stacks” to Tame the Cascade appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

I remember searching for tutorials for making seamless patterns in Photoshop¹ all the time back in the day.

It’s fun to see this little website for building repeating patterns as its one job. It does everything you’d expect: pick a background, drag some decorations onto it and position them (overlapping an edge is fine, which is the hard part, and makes the designs look less griddy), color them, and away you go.

1. The trick is to make a square with a design in it, then Filter > Other > Offset of half the width/height to make the seamless repeating edges work, then add a bit more in gaps.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post Patternico appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

I’d say 85% of my grid usage is in one of these two categories…

1. I just need some pretty basic (probably equal width) columns that ends up being something like like grid-template-columns: repeat(3, minmax(0, 1fr)); to be safe.
2. Actually doing some real layout where five minutes in I realize I’d really like subgrid.

Subgrid? It’s a nice intuitive way to have a child element on the grid inherit relevant grid lines from the parent grid.

Here’s a great recent video from Rachel Andrew covering it. Last year, we linked up her talk on the same! It’s such a clutch feature and I wish we could rely on it cross-browser. Right now, Firefox is the only one that has it. (Chrome issue, Safari issue)

In my recent video, right about at 20 minutes, I realize subgrid would make even a fairly simple layout much nicer, like removing the need for variables or resorting to magic numbers.

The post Just another +1 for subgrid appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

The question of how and where to learn HTML & CSS is a highly reasonable thing to ask. The answer depends on all sorts of things: how serious you are, your current foundation, what other resources are available to you, what you hope to do with what you learn, and how much time you have, among probably a zillion other things.

Let’s look at a bunch of options and you can choose the ones that feel right to you.

You could read a book.

There are a ton of books out there that cover HTML and CSS (and often together). They probably all do a fine job. There’s no need to chronicle all the choices here. These two are my personal recommendations. You probably don’t even need both.

HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites

Jon Duckett’s is incredibly well-designed and approachable:

Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics

Jennifer Robbins’ covers a bit more ground and is designed to be useful for either personal reading or as a classroom textbook.

You could go through a free online course or guide. Frontend Masters

Frontend Masters has a very in-depth bootcamp they give away for free. It’s 21 hours of high-quality video learning! If it clicks with you, you can sign up for the more advanced paid courses.

freeCodeCamp

freeCodeCamp is also (wait for it) free and has a step-by-step process to it where you don’t just watch, there are tasks for you to complete.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy has an Intro to HTML/CSS: Making webpages course that’s packaged in a super cool format. It’s like video in that you get to hear the instructor talk you through the learning, but what you see is a real live text editor and real-live output. Sometimes the teacher is controlling the code, and then sometimes it breaks for challenges in which you take over and edit the code yourself.

Don’t Fear the Internet

Jessica Hische and Russ Maschmeyer’s Don’t Fear the Internet is an eight-part series that gets you going with HTML & CSS — it even delves into the all-important topic of typography.

Through short tutorial videos, you’ll learn how to take a basic WordPress blog and manipulate the CSS, HTML (and even some PHP!) to match your aesthetic. 

Interneting is hard

Oliver James has a wonderful online course called Internetting is Hard (But it doesn’t have to be).

We designed HTML & CSS Is Hard to be the only introduction to HTML and CSS that you’ll ever need. If you put in the effort to read every section and write every code snippet, this tutorial has the potential to replace hundreds or even thousand of dollars worth of online courses and live training.

Scrimba / Intro to HTML

Eric Tirado has an Intro to HTML course on Scrimba, which is also a neat platform in that Eric’s voice guides you through the course, but visually it’s a combination of slides with a real code editor and preview.

You could read through all the posts in our Beginner’s Guide.

We have a guide (a collection of articles, videos, and links) called Just Starting Out with CSS & HTML. I hope there is stuff in there that can help kickstart or augment your early learning because that’s the intent.

You could find and take a paid online course.

I often join gyms because the accountability of paying for something gets me to do it. I know I can do situps, pushups, and go for a jog for free, but the gym membership makes a thing of it. Well, same could be said about paying for a course on HTML and CSS.

These are broad generalizations, but good places to start:

• Beginners: Treehouse, Lynda.com
• Intermediate: Design+Code, Udemy, Udacity, Pluralsight, Coursera
• Advanced: Frontend Masters, Wes Bos

You could go to an in-person code school or coding bootcamp Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

If you wanna put even more skin in the game, you could consider literally going to school. If you don’t have a college degree, that’s an option, although you’ll be looking at a broad education rather than a ticket to leveling up your web design and development skills alone. I’m a fan of that just for the general mind-broadening it involves.

But assuming you’re going to go to a coding-specific school…

• There are options that exist in single cities. I know someone who went to the All-Woman’s coding bootcamp Hackbright in San Francisco. There are places like Actualize in Chicago, Center Centre in Tennessee, and HackerYou in Toronto.
• There are bigger outfits like, Flatiron school (with campuses all around the U.S.) and General Assembly (with campuses all around the world).

There are probably dozens — if not hundreds — more, so this is more to inform you of the possibility of schooling. You don’t even have to go to a physical school since plenty of these offer online courses, too (but with the advantage of live instruction and cohorts). For example, LambdaSchool has the novelty of being free to start and paid later in the form of letting them take a portion of your salary after you get a job in the industry.

You could practice on CodePen.

Not every second of your learning should be strictly following some course laid out by a book, class, or teacher. It wouldn’t even be that way if you tried. You might as well embrace that. If something tickles your muse, go play!

I hope CodePen is a rewarding place to do that, making it both easy and useful, while providing a place to connect with other folks in the field.

You could build a personal site and learn what you need to get it done.

That’s how absolutely countless developers have cut their teeth, including me. I wanted a personal website years ago, and I struggled through getting a self-hosted WordPress site online so I could have full control over everything and bend it to my will. Once you have an actual website online, and you know at least some people are seeing it, it gives you all the motivation in the world to keep going and evolve further.

Equally as common: build a website for your band. Or a friend, friend-of-a-friend, or the business of your mother’s business partner’s sister. When you have a real project (a real website on the live internet) you have that feet-in-the-fire feeling that you’re responsible for something real that real people are going to see and you have to get it done and do a good job. That works tremendously well for some people.

You will actually learn by doing a combination of all this stuff.

People are obsessed with asking musicians if they’re “self-taught”. Like, if they are, their amazingness triples because it means their creative genius was delivered by a lightning bolt at birth. They don’t need anyone else to learn; they merely look at those guitar strings or piano keys and know what to do.

And if they were taught by a teacher, then, well, that’s all out the door. If they are good at all, then it’s because the teacher delivered that to them.

Total nonsense.

People learn anything — music and web development included — inside a hurricane of influences. Let’s stick with music for a second. Learning to play comes in many forms. You learn by listening to music an awful lot. You can do fundamental practice, like finger exercises and going up and down scales. You can learn to transpose chords on a chalkboard. You can watch YouTube all day and night. You can sign up for online courses. You can go to local jams to watch and play along. You can join a band. You can take lessons from someone advertising on Craigslist. You can go to a local music school. You can read books about music.

You get the idea.

You can and will do all of that. With learning web design and development, getting anywhere will involve all sorts of ways. There’s no silver bullet. It takes bashing on it lots of different ways. There’s no requirement to sprinkle money on it, but you do need multiple angles, time, and motivation.

Go forth and build websites, the ol’ ShopTalk mantra!

The post Where Do You Learn HTML & CSS in 2020? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Have you ever come across a badly designed product and thought to yourself “How on God’s green earth would I use this? “ You are not alone! I have often felt frustrated, irritated and even angry at...

I think of grids as arrangements of rectangles with vertical and horizontal lines running through. And they are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still do clever things in how we place things on those grids and what we do with the elements afterwards.

In this demo by Jesse Breneman, a grid of hexagons is created by setting up the grid columns with math such that each block can span over three columns and two rows so that the blocks overlap in a way that allows a clip-path to be applied around them. This carves a block into a hexagon that is evenly spaced with the others. Very clever.

And, ha, that’s a hell of a domain name Jesse. Personally, I don’t know anything about blogging about CSS at a super cheesy domain name.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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If you were to ask me what question I hear most about front-end development, I’d say it’s“How do I get better at CSS?”. That question usually comes up after sharing a CSS illustration I have made. It’s something I love to do over on CodePen.

To many, CSS is this mythical beast that can’t be tamed. This tweet from Chris made me chuckle because, although ironic, there’s a lot of truth to it. That said, what if I told you that you were only a few properties and techniques away from creating anything you wanted? The truth is that you are indeed that close.

I’ve been wanting to compose an article like this for some time, but it’s a hard topic to cover because there are so many possibilities and so many techniques that there’s often more than one way to accomplish the same thing. The same is true with CSS illustrations. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. We’re all using the same canvas. There are simply so many different tools to get those pixels on the page.

While there is no “one size fits all” approach to CSS illustration, what I can offer is a set of techniques that might help you on your journey.

CodePen Embed Fallback Time and practice

CSS illustration takes lots of time and practice. The more accurate you want to be and the more complicated the illustration, the longer it’s going to take. The time-consuming part isn’t usually deciding on which properties to use and how, but the tinkering of getting things to look right. Be prepared to get very familiar with the styles inspector in your browser dev tools! I also recommend trying out VisBug if you haven’t.

Two fantastic CSS artists are Ben Evans and Diana Smith. Both have recently talked about time consumption when referring to CSS illustration.

Diana’s PureCSS Gaze took her two long weekends to complete. She talks about some of her techniques here and here. “If you have the time, patience, and drive, it is certainly possible,” she says.

I posted a meme-like picture about a cup and Ben’s response summed things up perfectly:

I was tempted to create this in CSS when I first saw the tweet but then thought my reply would take about a month.

It takes time!

CSS Illustration pic.twitter.com/vqpQLKTte5

— Jhey &#x1f6e0; (@jh3yy) May 10, 2020> Tracing is perfectly acceptable

We often have an idea of what it is that we want to illustrate. This article isn’t about design, after all.; it’s about taking an image and rendering it with the DOM and CSS. I’m pretty sure this technique has been around since the dawn of time. But, it’s one I’ve been sharing the last few months.

• Find or create an image of what it is you want to illustrate.
• Pull it into your HTML with an <img> tag.
• Position it in a way that it will sit underneath your illustration.
• Reduce the image opacity so that it’s still visible but not too overpowering.
• Trace it with the DOM.

To my surprise, this technique isn’t common knowledge. But it’s invaluable for creating accurate CSS illustrations.

See this trick in action here:

Here’s a timelapse of creating that CSS @eggheadio &#x1f60e;

Tweaked the shadows with clip-path after &#x1f6e0;️

&#x1f4bb; https://t.co/XhDRspwwFg via @CodePen #webdev #coding #CSS #animation #webdesign #design #creative #100DaysOfCode #HTML #Timelapse https://t.co/ZQ1hyzcoSA pic.twitter.com/iPf7ksYCGX

— Jhey &#x1f6e0; (@jh3yy) May 1, 2020

And try it out here:

CodePen Embed Fallback Pay attention to responsiveness

If there are two takeaway techniques to take from this article, let it be the “Tracing” one above and this next one. 

There are some fantastic examples of CSS illustration out there. But the one unfortunate thing about some of them is that they aren’t styled — or even viewable — on small screens. We live in an age where first impressions with tech are important. Consider the example of a keyboard illustrated with CSS. Someone comes across your work, opens it up on their smartphone, and they’re greeted with only half the illustration or a small section of it. They probably missed the coolest parts of the demo!

Here’s my trick: leverage viewport units for your illustrations and create your own scaled unit. 

For sizing and positioning, you either have the option of using a scaled unit or percentage. This is particularly useful when you need to use a box shadow because the property accepts viewport units but not percentages.

Consider the CSS egghead.io logo I created above. I found the image I wanted to use and popped it in the DOM with an img tag.

<image src='egghead.png'/> img {   height: 50vmin;   left: 50%;   opacity: 0.25;   position: fixed;   top: 50%;   transform: translate(-50%, -50%); }

The height, 50vmin, is the desired size of the CSS illustration. The reduced opacity allows us to “trace” the illustration clearly as we progress.

Then, we create our scaled unit.

/**   * image dimensions are 742 x 769   * width is 742   * height is 769   * my desired size is 50vmin */ :root {   --size: 50;   --unit: calc((var(--size) / 769) * 1vmin); }

With the image dimensions in place, we can create a uniform unit that’s going to scale with our image. We know the height is the largest unit, so we use that as a base to create a fractional unit.

We get something like this:

--unit: 0.06501950585vmin;

That looks awkward but, trust me, it’s fine. We can use this to size our illustration’s container using calc().

.egg {   height: calc(769 * var(--unit));   position: relative;   width: calc(742 * var(--unit));   z-index: 2; }

If we use either percentages or our new --unit custom property to style elements within the container of our CSS illustration, we will get responsive CSS illustrations… and all it took was a few lines of math using CSS variables!

Resize this demo and you’ll see that everything stay in proportion always using 50vmin as the sizing constraint.

CodePen Embed Fallback Measure twice, cut once

Another tip is to measure things. Heck, you van even grab a tape measure if you’re working with a physical object!

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This may look a little funky but I measured this scene. It’s the TV combo unit I have in my lounge. Those measurements equate to centimeters. I used those to get a responsive unit based on the actual height of the TV. We can give that number — and all others — a name that makes it easy to remember what it’s for, thanks to custom properties.

:root {   --light-switch: 15;   --light-switch-border: 10;   --light-switch-top: 15;   --light-switch-bottom: 25;   --tv-bezel: 15;   --tv-unit-bezel: 4;   --desired-height: 25vmin;   --one-cm: calc(var(--desired-height) / var(--tv-height));   --tv-width: 158.1;   --tv-height: 89.4;   --unit-height: 42;   --unit-width: 180;   --unit-top: 78.7;   --tv-bottom: 114.3;   --scaled-tv-width: calc(var(--tv-width) * var(--one-cm));   --scaled-tv-height: calc(var(--tv-height) * var(--one-cm));   --scaled-unit-width: calc(var(--unit-width) * var(--one-cm));   --scaled-unit-height: calc(var(--unit-height) * var(--one-cm)); }

As soon as we calculate a variable, we can use it everywhere. I know my TV is 158.1cm wide and 89.4cm tall. I checked the manual. But in my CSS illustration, it will always scale to 25vmin.

Use absolute positioning on all the things

This one will save you a few keystrokes. More often than not, you’ll be looking to absolutely position elements. Save yourself and put this rule somewhere.

/* Your class name may vary */ .css-illustration *, .css-illustration *:after, .css-illustration *:before, .css-illustration:after, .css-illustration:before {   box-sizing: border-box;   position: absolute; }

Your keyboard will thank you!

Positioning is a tricky concept in CSS. You can read up on it in the CSS Almanac for more information on how to use it.

Or, have a play with this little positioning playground:

CodePen Embed Fallback Stick to an approach

This is by far the hardest thing to do. How do you approach a CSS illustration? Where do you even start? Should you start with the outermost part and work your way in? That doesn’t work so well.

Odds are that you’ll try some approaches and find a better way to go about it. You’ll certainly do a little back-and-forth but, the more you practice, the better you’ll get at spotting patterns and developing an approach that works best for you.

I tend to relate my approach to how you’d go about creating a vector image where illustrations are made up of layers. Split it up and sketch it on paper if you need to. But, start from the bottom and work your way up. This tends to mean larger shapes first, and finer details later. You can always tinker with the stacking index when you need to move elements around.

Maintain a solid structure for your styles

That leads us to the structure. Try to avoid a flat DOM structure for your illustration. Keeping things atomic makes it easier to move parts of your illustration. It will also makes it much easier to show and hide parts of the illustration or even animate them later. Consider the CSS Snorlax demo. The arms, feet, head, etc. are separate elements. That made animating the arm a lot easier than if I had tried to keep things together since I could simply apply the animation to the .snorlax__arm-left class.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Here’s a timelapse shot of me creating the demo:

Attempted to put together a timelapse of the CSS Snorlax we built last night &#x1f605;

Amusing watching it back!

&#x1f4bb; https://t.co/vbVYmFUN5V via @CodePen#webdev #coding #HTML #CSS #webdesign #100DaysOfCode #creative #design #animation pic.twitter.com/0mJtLPRQfP

— Jhey &#x1f6e0; (@jh3yy) April 28, 2020 Handling awkward shapes

There’s a pretty good article right here on CSS-Tricks for creating shapes with CSS. But what about more “awkward” shapes, like a long curve or even an outer curve? In these scenarios, we need to think outside the box. Properties such as overflow, border-radius, and clip-path are big helpers.

Consider this CSS Jigglypuff demo. Toggle the checkbox.

CodePen Embed Fallback

That’s the key for creating curved shapes! We have an element much larger than the body with a border-radius applied. We then apply overflow: hidden to the body to cut that part off.

How might we create an outer curve? This one’s a little tricky. But a trick I like to use is a transparent element with a thick border. Then apply a border-radius and clip the excess, if required.

CodePen Embed Fallback

If you hit the toggle, it reveals the element we are using to go across that corner. Another trick might be to overlay a circle that matches the background color. This is fine until we need to change the background color. It’s OK if you have a variable or something in place for that color. But, it could make things a little harder to maintain.

clip-path is your friend

You might have noticed a couple of interesting CSS properties in that last demo, including clip-path. You’ll most likely need clip-path if you want to create complex CSS shapes. It’s especially handy for cutting off bits of elements when hiding parent box overflow doesn’t do.

Here’s a little demo I built some time ago that showcases different clip-path possibilities.

CodePen Embed Fallback

There’s also this demo that takes ideas from the “Shapes of CSS” article and re-created with clip-path.

CodePen Embed Fallback border-radius is your other friend

You’re going to need border-radius to create curves. One uncommon trick is to use a “double” syntax. This allows you to create a horizontal and vertical radius for each corner.

Play with this demo to really appreciate the power of border-radius. I advocate using percentages across the board in order keep things responsive.

CodePen Embed Fallback Shading techniques

You’ve got all the shapes, everything is nicely laid out, and all the right colors are in place… but something still looks off. Odds are that it’s a lack of shading.

Shading adds depth and create a realistic feel. Consider this ecreation of a Gal Shir illustration. Gal is fantastic at using shades and gradients to make beautiful illustrations. I thought it would be fun to do a recreate it and include a switch that toggles the shading to see just what a difference it makes.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Shading effects are often created with a box-shadow and background-image combination.

The key thing with these properties is that we can stack them in a comma-separated list. For example, the cauldron in the demo has a list of gradients that are being used across the body.

.cauldron {   background:     radial-gradient(25% 25% at 25% 55%, var(--rim-color), transparent),     radial-gradient(100% 100% at -2% 50%, transparent, transparent 92%, var(--cauldron-color)),     radial-gradient(100% 100% at -5% 50%, transparent, transparent 80%, var(--darkness)),     linear-gradient(310deg, var(--inner-rim-color) 25%, transparent), var(--cauldron-color); }

Note that radial-gradient() and a linear-gradient() are being used here and not always with perfectly round numeric values. Again, those numbers are just fine. In fact, you’ll spend a lot of time tweaking and tinkering with things in the style inspector.

It’s generally the same working with box-shadow. However, with that, we can also use the inset value to create tricky borders and additional depth.

.cauldron__opening {   box-shadow:     0 0px calc(var(--size) * 0.05px) calc(var(--size) * 0.005px) var(--rim-color) inset,     0 calc(var(--size) * 0.025px) 0 calc(var(--size) * 0.025px) var(--inner-rim-color) inset,     0 10px 20px 0px var(--darkness), 0 10px 20px -10px var(--inner-rim-color); }

There are certainly times where it will make more sense to go with filter: drop-shadow() instead to get the effect you want.

Lynn Fisher’s a.singlediv.com is a brilliant example of these properties in action. Have a poke around on that site and inspect some of the illustrations for great ways to use box-shadow and background-image in illustrations.

box-shadow is so powerful that you could create your entire illustration with it. I once joked about creating a CSS illustration of a dollar.

In CSS right? &#x1f605;#webdev #CSS #animation #webdesign #coding #100DaysOfCode #HTML https://t.co/VmyeySsK83

— Jhey &#x1f6e0; (@jh3yy) April 22, 2020

I used a generator to create the illustration with a single div. But Alvaro Montoro took it a little further and wrote a generator that does it with box-shadow instead.

Preprocessors are super helpful

While they aren’t required, using preprocessors can help keep your code neat and tidy. For example, Pug makes writing HTML faster, especially when it comes to using loops for dealing with a bunch of repeating elements. From there, we can scope CSS custom properties in a way that we only need to define styles once, then overwrite them where needed.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Here’s another example that demonstrates a DRY structure. The flowers are constructed with the same markup, but each has its own index class that is used to apply scoped CSS properties.

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The first flower has these properties:

.flower--1 {   --hue: 190;   --x: 0;   --y: 0;   --size: 125;   --r: 0; }

It’s the first one, so all the others are based off it. Notice how the second flower is off to the right and up slightly. All that takes is assigning different values to the same custom properties:

.flower--2 {   --hue: 320;   --x: 140;   --y: -75;   --size: 75;   --r: 40; }

Animated responsive CSS Leif features in the latest CodePen Spark! ✨

For those who don’t know Animal Crossing, Leif is a green-thumbed Sloth who visits your island &#x1f33b;

Here’s a timelapse! &#x1f4f9;

&#x1f4bb; https://t.co/tkHX4nWXp7 via @CodePen pic.twitter.com/naJIrsSlYM

— Jhey &#x1f6e0; (@jh3yy) May 19, 2020 That’s it!

Go forth, use these tips, come up with your own, share them, and share your CSS masterpieces! And hey, if you have your own advice, please share that too! This is definitely the sort of thing that is learned through lots of trial and error — what works for me may look different from what works for you and we can learn from those different approaches

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As front-end developers, our job is working with browsers. Knowing how many we have and the health of them is always of great interest. As far as numbers go, we have fewer recently than we have in the past. It’s only this month that Edge is starting to auto-update browsers to the Chromium version, yet another notable milestone in the shrinking number of browsers.

A few years back, Rachel Nabors likened the situation to a biological ecosystem and how diversity means health:

If we lose one of those browser engines, we lose its lineage, every permutation of that engine that would follow, and the unique takes on the Web it could allow for.

And it’s not likely to be replaced.

A huge consideration in all this is the open-source nature of what we have left. Remember that Microsoft’s browser technologies were not open-source. Brian Kardell:

In important ways, we are a more diverse, efficient and healthier ecosystem with the three multi-os, open-source engines we have left (Blink, Gecko, and WebKit) than when we had had more and were dominated by projects that weren’t that at all.

As a followup Stuart Langridge touches on another kind of diversity:

What’s really important is diversity of influence: who has the ability to make decisions which shape the web in particular ways, and do they make those decisions for good reasons or not so good?

Here’s hoping that the browsers we have left will continue to evolve, perhaps even fork, and find ways to compete on anything except standards. While the current situation isn’t as bad as perhaps some folks were worried about with the loss of Microsoft’s engines (and maybe it’s even a good thing), it would certainly be bad news if we lost even more browsers [nervously glancing at Firefox], both in shrinking numbers and shrinking diversity of influence.

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