Newsletters

[Robin]: I stumbled upon this nifty VS Code plugin called TabOut this week that lets you hit the tab key and jump between quotes in a line of code. It’s a brilliant plugin because I think it does precisely what …

😯

[Robin]: This week I’ve been thinking about page transitions on the web and this post from Chris earlier this year:

We can technically build page transitions now, even without single-page-app architecture, but what I want are purpose-built APIs that

[Robin]: Let’s say you need some margin and padding utility classes. In Tailwind, for example, you’d write some HTML like this:

<div class="pt-6"...</div

This sets the padding-top CSS property to 6 in the scale. 1 is less …

[Robin]: Lately in the newsletter, we’ve written about neat things we’ll be able to do with CSS in the future. CSS nesting! Container queries! Query units! New pseudo-elements! All this is very exciting but I think we need to slow …

Nesting CSS classes is pretty handy. If you’re familiar with preprocessing languages like Sass and Less then you’re probably used to nesting like this:

.card {
  .card-text {
    font-size: 1em;
  }
  &.card-large {
    padding: 2em;
  }
  body.home & .card-title 

Chris here, filling in for Robin, our usually weekly correspondent. And speaking of Robin, you should subscribe to his blog, as it’s a great personal blog, which he’s moving to Astro and writing about that as just one worthy …

[Robin]: Have you ever heard of CSS query units? They aren’t a thing in CSS just yet, but let me set the stage to explain exactly how they would be useful. I only stumbled across the idea because I bumped …

I have a terrible confession to make. Send me to jail and lock away the key because, despite how much I rant about variable fonts, I’ve never really used them. I’ve read tutorials and demos and I love seeing what’s …

[Robin]: I’ve been in my fair share of meetings over the years; those that were unfocused and a bit rambling, those that were unclear about why they even needed to be meetings in the first place, or heck meetings that …

[Robin]: When it comes to web development I feel like images have been in a state of constant flux over the past few years. What’s the best way to add an image to a website? Well, that question is much …

[Robin]: Max Böck asks when should we use @container or @media queries?

While I think container queries will eventually replace most “low level” responsive logic, there are still a lot of good usecases for trusty media queries.

A combination

[Robin]: Exciting news! This week Astro was formally introduced — it’s a static site builder that is, well, pretty gosh darn exciting:

In Astro, you compose your website using UI components from your favorite JavaScript web framework (React, Svelte, Vue,

For some reason this week I’ve been returning to the very basics of HTML and CSS, going over a lot of blog posts that remind me that there’s still some gaps I have in my knowledge when it comes to …

[Robin]: Earlier this week I stumbled upon a problem where the only solution I could think of was a hypothetical one: an :nth-letter selector in CSS. It would work something like this:

.element:nth-letter(2) {
  color: red;
}

Similar to :nth-child…

[Robin]: Stefánia Péter made a neat website called CSS Hell. It tells us what to avoid when writing CSS and I like this note about specificity:

Developers often write overly specific selectors just to be 10000% sure their

[Robin]: First up this week, Una Kravets wrote about how marvelous the future will be with container queries:

Container queries will be the single biggest change in web styling since CSS3, altering our perspective of what “responsive design” means.

[Robin]: This week I’ve been thinking about this post from the team at gov.uk where they write about how they made a button to show and hide the password of an input. They do that by toggling between the …

[Robin]: I thought I knew everything when it comes to responsive images, but this article by Addy Osmani sure proved me wrong. He writes about how images impact performance and how that ties into Google’s Core Web Vitals but goes …

[Robin]: Imagine you could jump into the future — let’s say ten years — and watch how you write CSS. What would that look like? How much of the language do you expect will change over that period of time? …

[Robin]: It’s been a long and winding road, but container queries are starting to arrive. They just landed in Chrome Canary. I first spotted this news on Andy Bell’s blog a few weeks ago when he made a great …