It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
There is already an env() function in CSS, but it kinda came out of nowhere as an Apple thing for dealing with "The Notch" but it has made it's way to be a draft spec. The point will be for UAs or authors to declare variables that cannot be changed. Global const for CSS, sorta.… Read article
Here’s a neat trick from Andy Bell where he uses CSS Custom Properties to check if a particular CSS feature is supported by using JavaScript.
Basically, he's using the ability CSS has to check for browser support on a particular property, setting a custom property that returns a value of either 0 or 1 (Boolean!) and then informing the JavaScript to execute based on that value.… Read article
CSS Custom Properties have been a hot topic for a while now, with tons of great articles about them, from great primers on how they work to creative tutorials to do some real magic with them. If you’ve read more than one or two articles on the topic, then I’m sure you’ve noticed that they start by setting up the custom properties on the :root about 99% of the time.
While putting custom properties on the :root is great … Read article
I reckon that a lot of our uses of Sass maps can be replaced with CSS Custom properties – but hear me out for a sec.
When designing components we often need to use the same structure of a component but change its background or text color based on a theme. For example, in an alert, we might need a warning style, an error style, and a success style – each of which might be slightly different, like this: … Read article
As you may know, the recent updates and additions to CSS are extremely powerful. From Flexbox to Grid, and — what we’re concerned about here — Custom Properties (aka CSS variables), all of which make robust and dynamic layouts and interfaces easier than ever while opening up many other possibilities we used to only dream of.
The other day, I was thinking that there must be a way to use Custom Properties to color an element's background while … Read article
I recently came across an interesting sliced disc design. The disc had a diagonal gradient and was split into horizontal slices, offset a bit from left to right. Naturally, I started to think what would the most efficient way of doing it with CSS be.… Read article
A nicely detailed tutorial by Kirupa that gets into how you might provide a UI with persisted options that control whether animations run or not.
The trick is custom properties that control the movement:
body {
--toggle: 0;
--playState: "paused";
}Which are used within animations and transitions:
.animation {
animation: bobble 2s infinite;
animation-play-state: var(--playState);
}
.transition {
transition: transform calc(var(--toggle) * .15s) ease-in-out;
}This confused me for a bit here so I'm writing it out while it's fresh in mind. Just because you're using a web component doesn't mean the styles of it are entirely isolated. You might have content within a web component that is styled normally along with the rest of your website. … Read article
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% … Read article
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 … Read article