Articles Tagged custom properties

Custom properties not only enable us to make our code more efficient, but allow us to work some real magic with CSS too. One area where they have huge potential is theming. At Atomic Smash we use Tailwind CSS, a utility class framework, for writing our styles. In this article, we’ll look at how custom properties can be used for theming, and how we can integrate them with Tailwind to maximize the reusability of our code. We won’t cover … Read article “Color Theming with CSS Custom Properties and Tailwind”

Una Kravetz digs into how Chrome now allows you to declare CSS custom properties directly from CSS with more information than just a string. … Read article “Using @property for CSS Custom Properties”

I was working on a thing the other day that needed a visible timer. There was UI precedent for this type of timer on the project. People didn’t want to see numbers ticking downward; it was more ideal to see a “bar” drain away from full to empty. I mention that because there are tons and tons of ways you could approach a “timer” UI. This isn’t an exploration of all of those (a search on CodePen would be … Read article “Timer Bars in CSS with Custom Properties”

The title of this Sara Soueidan article speaks to me. I’m a big fan of the idea that some CSS is best applied globally, and some CSS is best applied scoped to a component. I’m less interested in how that is done and more interested in just seeing that conceptual approach used in some fashion.

Sara details an approach where components don’t have too much styling by default, but have CSS custom properties applied to them that are ready to … Read article “Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables”

Recently, CSS has added a lot of new cool features such as custom properties and new functions. While these things can make our lives a lot easier, they can also end up interacting with preprocessors, like Sass, in funny ways.

So this is going to be a post about the issues I’ve encountered, how I go around them, and why I still find Sass necessary these days.… Read article “When Sass and New CSS Features Collide”

Since the inception of CSS in 1994, the cascade and inheritance have defined how we design on the web. Both are powerful features but, as authors, we’ve had very little control over how they interact. Selector specificity and source order provide some minimal “layering” control, without a lot of nuance — and inheritance requires an unbroken lineage. Now, CSS Custom Properties allow us to manage and control both cascade and inheritance in new ways.

I want to show you … Read article “Using Custom Property “Stacks” to Tame the Cascade”

The @property is totally new to me, but I see it’s headed to Chrome, so I suppose it’s good to know about!

There is a draft spec and an “intent to ship” document. The code from that document shows:

@property --my-property {
  syntax: "<color";
  initial-value: green;
  inherits: false;
}

Before the advent of CSS custom properties (we might call them “variables” in this article as that’s the spirit of them), implementing multiple color schemes on the same website usually meant writing separate stylesheets. Definitely not the most maintainable thing in the world. Nowadays, though, we can define variables in a single stylesheet and let CSS do the magic.

Even if you aren’t offering something like user-generated or user-chosen color themes, you might still use the concept of theming on … Read article “Creating Color Themes With Custom Properties, HSL, and a Little calc()”