CSS-Tricks

Articles by
Chris Coyier

Founder, writer, designer, spam-deleter, email personality

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Safari Ripper ☠️

# By Chris Coyier

Security researcher Sabri posted a bit of code that will "force restart any iOS device." It's interesting to see HTML & CSS have this kind of dangerous power. It's essentially a ton of <div>s scaled to be pretty huge and then set over a repeating JPG image with each <div> blurring the background via backdrop-filter. It must cause such extreme and unhandled memory usage that it wreaks havoc on the browser as well as the entire operating system.

I was trying to test it out myself and be really careful not to execute it... but of course I did, and it crashed my Chrome 68 on a MacBook Pro. Not the whole operating system, but I had to force quit the browser. Then again, I suppose even while(true) {} can do that!

The comment thread on the gist hast more interesting details, like how it crashes iOS Safari 9+ (including the new version 12!) and weird behavior on the PlayStation 3 native browser.

Aspect Ratio Media Elements and intrinsicsize

# By Chris Coyier

If you need an aspect-ratio sized <div></div> (or any element that can have children), you can do it. Perhaps the cleanest way is a custom-property-sized pseudo-element that pushes the correct minimum height through padding-based-on-width.

But media elements like <img /> don't have children. The <video></video> tag isn't self-closing, but when it is supported (almost always), the content of it is replaced with a shadow DOM you don't control. Besides, these are the only two elements that "size to an external resource." So, how do you enforce aspect ratio on them when using a variable width like 100% or 75vw? Well, once they load, they will have their natural aspect ratio, so that's nice. But it also means they don't know the height while they are loading and it may cause performance jank-ening reflow.

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Why Designers Don’t Want to Think When They Read

# By Chris Coyier

We've all seen articles like "The Top 5 Ways To Fix Your Sign Up Flow and Get On With Your Life." Articles like this aren't wrong or bad, they are just shallow and a bit junk food-y and BuzzFeed-y. Of course, a designer's actual job is complicated, nuanced, and difficult. But deep dives into all that are far less common.

Khoi Vinh has been writing about this and points to some heavy self-reflection from Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, publishers of the very popular UX Collective.

It’s clear that the currency of design discourse is really concerned with the “how” of design, not the “why” of it. As Teixeira and Braga write:

While designers tend to be skeptical of magic formulas—we’re decidedly suspicious of self-help gurus, magic diets, or miraculous career advice—we have a surprisingly high tolerance for formulaic solutions when it comes to design.

That’s a pointed criticism but, from my perspective, it’s also quite accurate.

Updating a CSS Variable with JavaScript

# By Chris Coyier

Here's a CSS variable (formally called a "CSS custom property"):

:root {
  --mouse-x: 0px;
  --mouse-y: 0px;
}

Perhaps you use them to set a position:

.mover {
  left: var(--mouse-x);
  top: var(--mouse-y);
}

To update those values from JavaScript, you'd:

let root = document.documentElement;

root.addEventListener("mousemove", e => {
  root.style.setProperty('--mouse-x', e.clientX + "px");
  root.style.setProperty('--mouse-y', e.clientY + "px");
});

That's all.

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Changes on CSS Grid Layout in percentages and indefinite height

# By Chris Coyier

This is a wonderfully nerdy deep dive into a very specific CSS change by Manuel Rego Casasnovas. Here's a bit of terminology we should know:

First question is, what is an indefinite size? The simple answer is that a definite size is a size that you can calculate without taking into account the contents of the element. An indefinite size is the opposite, in order to compute it you need to check the contents first.

And then goes on to explain how complicated this all gets. The change, in a nutshell:

Percentages row tracks and gutters for indefinite height grid containers will be resolved against the intrinsic height instead of being treated as auto and zero respectively.

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