Articles Tagged custom properties

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

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

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 … Read article

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 … Read article