custom properties

There is a sentiment that leaving math calculations in your CSS is a good idea that I agree with. This is for math that you could calculate at authoring time, but specifically chose not to. For instance, if you needed a 7-column float-based grid (don't ask), it's cleaner and more intuitive:

.col {
  /* groan */
  width: 14.2857142857%;

  /* oh, I get it */
  width: calc(100% / 7);
}

You could probably prove that the calc() takes the computer 0.0000001% longer, so explicitly defining the width is technically faster for performance reason — but that is about the equivalent of not using punctuation in sentences because it saves HTML weight.

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I think it's kinda cool to see Google dropping repos of interesting web components. It demonstrates the possibilities of cool new web features and allows them to ship them in a way that's compatible with entirely web standards.

Here's one: <two-up>

I wanted to give it a try, so I linked up their example two-up-min.js script in a Pen and used the element by itself to see how it works. They expose the component's styling with custom properties, which I'd say is a darn nice use case for those.

See the Pen <two-up&rt; by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

This is the second post in a two-part series that looks into the way CSS variables can be used to make the code for complex layouts and interactions less difficult to write and a lot easier to maintain. The first installment walks through various use cases where this technique applies. This post covers the use of fallbacks and invalid values to extend the technique to non-numeric values.

The strategy of using CSS Variables to drive the switching of layouts and interactions that we covered in the first post in this series comes with one major caveat: it only works with numeric values — lengths, percentages, angles, durations, frequencies, unit-less number values and so on. As a result, it can be really frustrating to know that you're able to switch the computed values of more than ten properties with a single CSS variable, but then you need to explicitly switch the non-numeric values of properties like flex-direction or text-align from row to column or from left to right or the other way around.

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This is the first post of a two-part series that looks into the way CSS variables can be used to make the code for complex layouts and interactions less difficult to write and a lot easier to maintain. This first installment walks through various use cases where this technique applies. The second post covers the use of fallbacks and invalid values to extend the technique to non-numeric values.

What if I told you a single CSS declaration makes the difference in the following image between the wide screen case (left) and the second one (right)? And what if I told you a single CSS declaration makes the difference between the odd and even items in the wide screen case?

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Let's say you wanted to move the background-position on an element as you mouse over it to give the design a little pizzazz. You have an element like this:

<div class="module" id="module"></div>

And you toss a background on it:

.module {
  background-image: url(big-image.jpg);
}

You can adjust the background-position in JavaScript like this:

const el = document.querySelector("#module");

el.addEventListener("mousemove", (e) => {
  el.style.backgroundPositionX = -e.offsetX + "px";
  el.style.backgroundPositionY = -e.offsetY + "px";
});

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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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A little while ago, I wrote a well-received article about combining CSS variables with CSS grid to help build more maintainable layouts. But CSS grid isn’t just for pages! That is a common myth. Although it is certainly very useful for page layout, I find myself just as frequently reaching for grid when it comes to components. In this article I’ll address using CSS grid at the component level.

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I got the idea for doing something of the kind when I stumbled across this interactive SVG pie chart. While the SVG code is as compact as it gets (a single <circle></circle> element!), using strokes for creating pie chart slices is problematic as we run into rendering issues on Windows for Firefox and Edge. Plus, in 2018, we can accomplish a lot more with a lot less JavaScript!

I managed to get the following result using a single HTML element for the chart and very little JavaScript. The future should completely eliminate the need for any JavaScript, but more on that later.

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I first got the idea to CSS something of the kind when I saw this gradient infinity logo by Infographic Paradise. The gradient doesn't look like in the original illustration, as I chose to generate the rainbow logically instead of using the Dev Tools picker or something like that, but other than that, I think I got pretty close—let's see how I did that!