334: Custom Properties

Chris & Shaw talk about a big ol’ conversion to getting CodePen’s color system to use --custom-properties all the way through, rather than Sass variables. Why? All sorts of reasons, kinda boiling down to the fact that they are just better. Here’s a tiny one: you can use the Web Inspector and see what some other element is colored easily. Here’s a huge one: ability to do theming way easier. But the refactoring isn’t without some bumps in the road, like the fact that CSS doesn’t have a way to alter colors (like lighten, darken, or add alpha) terribly easily yet, meaning we needed some work arounds.

Time Jumps

  • 01:01 Using Sass for colors
  • 08:28 Prefixing our global variables
  • 11:39 Theming all over CodePen
  • 15:41 Switching away from Sass with colors
  • 23:18 Sponsor: Retool
  • 24:54 Future CSS Color Models coming
  • 33:10 Buttons and custom properties

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