Detecting Specific Text Input with HTML and CSS

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Louis Lazaris breaks down some bonafide CSS trickery from Jane. The Pen shows off interactivity where:

  1. You have to press a special combination of keys on a keyboard.
  2. Then type a secret password.

From there, a special message pops up on the screen. Easily JavaScript territory, but no, this is done here entirely in HTML and CSS, which is wild.

A lot of little known features and tricks is combined here to pull this off, like HTML’s accesskey and pattern attributes, as well as :not(), :placeholder-shown, and :valid in CSS—not to mention the custom property toggle trick.

That’s… wow. And yet, look how very little code it is.

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