Articles by

Geoff Graham

VuePress is a new tool from Vue creator Evan You that spins up Vue projects that are more on the side of websites based on content and markup than progressive web applications and does it with a few strokes of the command line.

We talk a lot about Vue around here, from a five-part series on getting started with it to a detailed implementation of a serverless checkout cart

But, like anything new, even the basics of getting started can feel overwhelming and complex. A tool like VuePress can really lower the barrier to entry for many who (like me) are still wrapping our heads around the basics and tinkering with the concepts.

There are alternatives, of course! For example, Nuxt is already primed for this sort of thing and also makes it easy to spin up a Vue project. Sarah wrote up a nice intro to Nuxt and it's worth checking out, particularly if your project is a progressive web application. If you're more into React but love the idea of static site generating, there is Gatsby.

Brad frost picks up the ongoing conversation about design systems. Where many posts seem to center on how to create one and how to enforce it, the big takeaway here is that design systems are not synonymous with constraints. They're only as strict as we make them and new CSS features like custom properties actually open up new creative possibilities—something Andres Galante and Cliff Pyles recently pitched right here on CSS-Tricks.

Brad:

The aesthetic layer is often the most malleable layer of the frontend stack, which means that we can create systems that allow for a lot of aesthetic flexibility while still retaining a solid underlying structural foundation.

This not only sounds right, but puts a strong punctuation on why we love CSS: it's a set of styles that can be applied an infinite number of ways to the same HTML markup. A new layer of paint can be slapped on at any time, but the beams, walls and ceiling of the building can remain constant. Dave Rupert's personal site is a prime example of this and he details his approach to theming.

Ah, CSS Zen Garden...

The Edge team put together a thorough demo of variable fonts, showcasing them in all of their shape-shifting and adaptive glory. Equally interesting as the demo itself is a history of web typography and where variable fonts fit in the grand scheme of things.

This demo pairs well with v-fonts.com, which is an interactive collection of variable fonts that allows you to play around with the variable features each font provides.

This is by far the biggest deep dive I've seen on CSS Variables posted to the web and it's merely Chapter One of complete e-book on the topic.

Truth is, I'm still on the thick of reading through this myself, but had to stop somewhere in the middle to write this up and share it because it's just that gosh-darned useful. For example, the post goes into great detail on three specific use cases for CSS Variables and breaks the code down to give a better understanding of what it does, in true tutorial fashion.

Scoping, inheritance, resolving multiple declarations, little gotchas—there's plenty in here for beginners and advanced developers alike.

OK, back to reading. 🤓

The second iteration of CSS Grid is already in the works and the public editor's draft was released last week! While it is by no means the final W3C recommendation, this draft is the start of discussions around big concepts many of us have been wanting to see since the first level was released, including subgrids:

In some cases it might be necessary for the contents of multiple grid items to align to each other. A grid container that is itself a grid item can defer the definition of its rows and columns to its parent grid container, making it a subgrid. In this case, the grid items of the subgrid participate in sizing the grid of the parent grid container, allowing the contents of both grids to align.

(more…)

MDN released a comprehensive guide to Flexbox with new and updated materials by Rachel Andrew. The guide includes 11 posts demonstrating layouts, use cases and everything you could possibly want or need to know on the topic. All of the related Flexbox properties are nicely and conveniently attached to the table of contents, making this extremely easy to use.

(more…)