Category: End of Year Thoughts

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PureCSS Gaze

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Diana Smith with another mind-bending all HTML & CSS painting.

I love that these occupy a special place on the “Should I draw this in CSS?” curve. Things like simple shapes are definitely on the “yes” side of the curve. Then there’s a large valley where things get a little too impractical to draw that way, and using some other image format (e.g. SVG) makes way more sense.

Diana’s work pulls the curve back up to the “yes” side. Not only because it’s proof that CSS can be an amazing expressionistic art tool, but also from a performance standpoint — it’s only 2 KB of HTML and 10 KB of CSS.

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CSS fix for 100vh in mobile WebKit

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A surprisingly common response when asking people about things they’d fix about anything in CSS, is to improve the handling of viewport units.

One thing that comes up often is how they relate to scrollbars. For example, if an element is sized to 100vw and stretches edge-to-edge, that’s fine so long as the page doesn’t have a vertical scrollbar. If it does have a vertical scrollbar, then 100vw is too wide, and the presence of that vertical scrollbar triggers a horizontal scrollbar because viewport units don’t have an elegant/optional way of handling that. So you might be hiding overflow on the body when you otherwise wouldn’t need to, for example. (Demo)

Another scenario involves mobile browsers. You might use viewport units to help you position a fixed footer along the bottom of the screen. But then browser chrome might come up (e.g. navigation, keyboard, etc), and it may cover the footer, because the mobile browser doesn’t consider anything changed about the viewport size.

Matt Smith documents this problem:

On the left, the browser navigation bar (considered browser chrome) is covering up the footer making it appear that the footer is beyond 100vh when it is not. On the right, the -webkit-fill-available property is being used rather than viewport units to fix the problem.

And a solution of sorts:

body {
  min-height: 100vh;
  /* mobile viewport bug fix */
  min-height: -webkit-fill-available;
}

Does this really work? […] I’ve had no problems with any of the tests I’ve run and I’m using this method in production right now. But I did receive a number of responses to my tweet pointing to other possible problems with using this (the effects of rotating devices, Chrome not completely ignoring the property, etc.)

It would be better to get some real cross-browser solution for this someday, but I don’t see any issues using this as an improvement. It’s weird to use a vendor-prefixed property as a progressive enhancement, but hey, the world is weird.

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Constrained CSS grids without `max-width`

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Ain’t nothing wrong with max-width, but Ethan makes a point in the last sentence:

Rather than simply defaulting to max-width as a constraint, I can use the empty space around my design, and treat it as a layout tool.

If the space “around” your grid is actually part of the grid, it’s easier to use. Maybe you’d decide to scootch some author information up there after all, or show an ad, or who knows what. It will be more robust if you do it within the established grid.

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No-Class CSS Frameworks

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I linked up Water.css not long ago as an interesting sort of CSS framework. No classes. No <h2 class="is-title">. You just use semantic HTML and get styles. Is that going to “scale” very far? Probably not, but it sure is handy for styling things quickly, where — of course — you’re writing semantic HTML but don’t need to care tremendously about the look, other than it should look as decent as it can with low effort.

This week I saw MVP.css making the rounds. Same idea. There are a bunch more!

Even Foundation, while being a big honkin’ framework, does some pretty decent stuff classless-ly™.

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CSS Foldable Display Polyfill

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Foldable phones are starting to be a thing. Early days, for sure, but some are already shipping, and they definitely have web browsers on them. Stands to reason that, as web designers, we are going to want to know where that fold is so we can design screens that fit onto the top half and bottom half… or left half and right half¹.

Looks like that’s going to make its way to us in the form of env() constants, just like all that notch stuff.

The code block in the polyfill repo is:

@media (spanning: single-fold-vertical) {
  body {
    flex-direction: row;
  }
  .map {
    flex: 1 1 env(fold-left)
  }
  .locations-list {
    flex: 1;
  }
}

I would also think it could be…

@media (spanning: single-fold-vertical) {
  .page-wrap {
    display: grid;
    grid-template-columns: env(fold-left) 1fr;
  }
}

Interesting how there is no fold-right, isn’t it? And aren’t we trying to stay away from directional terms like that and use logical properties? Why not fold-inline-start?

  1. It’ll be interesting to see how that sentence ages. Just watch the first really popular foldable phone will have three segments.

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How to use CSS Scroll Snap

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Nada Rifki demonstrates the scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-alignCSS properties. I like that the demo shows that the items in the scrolling container can be different sizes. It is the edges of those children that matter, not some fixed snapping distance.

I like Max Kohler's coverage as well, which includes a demo where the snapping can happen in multiple directions.

This is one of those things where, if you didn't know about it, it's worth a solid golf clap for CSS.

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CSS :nth-of-class selector

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That's not a thing.

But it kinda is!

Bram covers how frustrating .bar:nth-child(2) is. It's not "select the second element of class .bar." It's "select the second element if it also has the class .bar." The good news? There is a real selector that does the former:

:nth-child(2 of .bar) { }

Safari only. Here are the tickets for Chrome and Firefox.

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The CSS Podcast

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From Adam and Una at Google, a podcast just about CSS. I believe I'm contractually obliged to link to that! Just one episode out so far, a shorty about the box model.

Last time I wrote up podcasts I like was 8 years ago most of them are dead now, except the biggies like This American Life and the like. ShopTalk Show and CodePen Radio are still going strong! These days I use Pocket Casts as a player and I like industry shows like:

Here's a screenshot of all the ones I subscribe to, but I find I only have time to listen to maybe 10% of that if I'm lucky.

I do a lot of listening to things friends say are good, whether I subscribe or not.

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Currying in CSS

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Funny timing on this I was just looking at the website for Utopia (which is a responsive type project which I hate to admit I don't fully understand) and I came across some CSS they show off that looked like this:

:root {
  --fluid-max-negative: (1 / var(--fluid-max-ratio) / var(--fluid-max-ratio));
  --fluid-min-negative: (1 / var(--fluid-min-ratio) / var(--fluid-min-ratio));
 
  ...
}

See anything weird there? That code is using mathematical operators, but there is no calc() function wrapped around it.

Just as my curiosity set in, Trys Mudford, a creator of Utopia, blogged it:

The value after the : in the CSS custom property does not have to be valid CSS. It won’t cause any errors, nor invalidate the custom property. It won’t be evaluated in the browser until used, or more specifically, placed in a calc() function.

Here's a contrived example:

:root {
  --padding: 1rem;
  
  /* These are meaningless alone */
  --padding-S: var(--padding) / 2;
  --padding-L: var(--padding) * 2;
}

.module--large {
  /* But they evaluate once they are in a calc() */
  padding: calc(var(--padding-L));
}

In my limited understanding, currying is like functions that return functions. I suppose this is sorta like that in that the alternate padding properties above are sort of like derivative functions of the main padding function (if you can call it that), and you only call them and execute them as needed.

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monica.css

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Monica Dinculescu:

I don’t want every possible padding and margin and colour and flexbox configuration in the world. I just want the ones that I know I end up using in every project. So here is monica.css: my very own CSS framework, which I copy paste at the beginning of every CSS file and take it from there.

I love it when people make their own CSS starter. I like Sanitize, but even that feels like a bit much for most things I poke around at. If I was making one for myself, I'd probably steal some of this stuff from Monica. I'd definitely pull the margin off body as I find myself writing that line a lot. I'd probably steal some of that [class] stuff from Andy's. My center class would probably just be text-align and I'd give myself some other centering class for my other favorite centering: display: grid; place-items: center;.

I love how everyone agrees on box-sizing.

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CSS4 is a Bad Idea

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Louis Lazaris, reacting to the idea of CSS4:

The reason “CSS3” worked is because it was real. It was the successor to “CSS2.1”. Everything after CSS2.1 was considered to be under the umbrella of “CSS3”.

The gist is that CSS4 isn't real, so won't work, and we don't need it anyway. Perhaps I overestimate the power of marketing, but I'd wager Louis underestimates it a bit. When an idea takes hold, basis in truth or not, it has tremendous power and money follows. See: politics and pet rocks.

Amelia Bellamy-Royds pointed out that there is a real thing we could point to, and those are "CSS Snapshots" that the working group produces that could be marketed as yearly versions. Like we have ES2019, we could have CSS2020.

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How to Create an Editable Table with jQuery & Pure CSS

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Using open-source components makes it really easy and quick to build powerful front-end elements for websites or apps. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to easily create an editable table using PureCSS and jQuery. There’s a demo available for this tutorial, click here to see. Getting Started The very first thing to do, indeed, is […]
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What’s the Difference Between Width/Height in CSS and Width/Height HTML attributes?

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Some HTML elements accept width and height as attributes. Some do not. For example:

<!-- valid, works, is a good idea -->
<img width="500" height="400" src="..." alt="...">
<iframe width="600" height="400" src="..."></iframe>
<svg width="20" height="20"></svg>

<!-- not valid, doesn't work, not a good idea -->
<div width="40" height="40"></div>
<span width="100" height="10"></span>

Those attributes are sometimes referred to as presentational attributes. The thing to know about them is that they are overridden by any other styling information whatsoever. That makes them ideal as a fallback.

So, if CSS loads and has a declaration like:

img {
  width: 400px;
}

...that is going to override the width="500" on the <img> tag above. Presentational attributes are the weakest kind of styling, so they are overridden by any CSS, even selectors with very low specificity.

What might be a smidge confusing is that presentational attributes seem like they would have high specificity. These inline styles, for instance, are very strong:

<img style="width: 500px; height: 400px;" src="..." alt="...">

Using an inline style (which works on any element, not a select few), we've moved from the weakest way to apply width and height to one of the strongest. Regular CSS will not override this, with a selector of any specificity strength. If we need to override them from CSS, we'll need !important rules. 

img {
  width: 400px !important;
}

To reiterate, presentational attributes on elements that accept them (e.g. <img>, <iframe>, <canvas>, <svg>, <video>) are a good idea. They are fallback sizing and sizing information as the page is loading. They are particularly useful on <svg>, which may size themselves enormously in an awkward way if they have a viewBox and lack width and height attributes. Browsers even do special magic with images, where the width and height are used to reserve the correct aspect-ratio derived space in a situation with fluid images, which is great for a smooth page loading experience.

But presentational attributes are also weak and are usually overridden in the CSS.

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Min and Max Width/Height in CSS

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Here's a nice deep dive into min-width / min-height / max-width / max-height from Ahmad Shadeed. I like how Ahmad applies the properties to real-world design situations in addition to explaining how it works. In the very first demo, for example, he shows a button where min-width is used as a method for (trying to) make sure a button has space on its sides. It works if the text is short enough, and fails when the text is longer. That's the kind of "CSS thinking" that is fundamental to this trade.

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How many CSS properties are there?

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Tomasz Łakomy posted a joke tweet about naming all the CSS attributes and Tejas Kumar replied with a joke answer, going as far as making an npm module. You can even run a terminal command to see them:

npx get-all-css-properties

You'll get 259 of them. The source code uses the website quackit.com for the data, which I'd never heard of. 🤷‍♂️

I would have probably looked at MDN, where some quick querySelectorAll handiwork in the console yields a different number: 584. But ooops, that's full of selectors, at-rules, and other stuff. Their reference only lists 72, but says it's incomplete.

W3Schools lists 228 of them. HTML Dog lists 125. Our almanac has 176, and I know we omit stuff on purpose (e.g. we file margin-left under margin instead of making its own entry).

The horse's mouth?

520 distinct property names from 66 technical reports and 66 editors' drafts.

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