Front End Web Development

Anchoreum: A New Game for Learning Anchor Positioning

Css Tricks - Tue, 11/12/2024 - 4:56am

You’ve played Flexbox Froggy before, right? Or maybe Grid Garden? They’re both absolute musts for learning the basics of modern CSS layout using Flexbox and CSS Grid. I use both games in all of the classes I teach and I never get anything but high-fives from my students because they love them so much.

As widely known as those games are, you may be less familiar with the name of the developer who made them. That would be Thomas Park, and he has a couple of CSS-Tricks articles notched in his belt. He also has a horde of other games in his CodePip collection of free and premium games for learning front-end techniques.

Thomas wrote in to share his latest game with us: Anchoreum.

I’ll bet the two nickels in my pocket that you know this game’s all about CSS Anchor Positioning. I love that Thomas has jumped on this so quickly because the feature is still fresh, and indeed is currently only supported in a couple of browsers at the moment.

This is the perfect time to learn about anchor positioning. It’s still relatively early days, but things are baked enough to be supported in Chrome and Edge so you can access the games. If you haven’t seen Juan’s big ol’ guide on anchor positioning, that’s another dandy way to get up to speed.

The objective is less on-the-nose than Flexbox Froggy and Grid Garden, which both lean heavily into positioning elements to complete game tasks. For example, Flexbox Froggy is about positioning frogs safely on lilypads. Grid Garden wants you to water specific garden areas to feed your carrots. Anchoreum? You’re in a museum and need to anchor labels to museum artifacts. I know, attaching target elements to the same anchor over and again could get boring. But thankfully the game goes beyond simple positioning by getting into multiple anchors, spanning, and position fallbacks.

Whatever the objective, the repetition is good for developing muscle memory and the overall outcome is still the same: learn CSS Anchor Positioning. I’m already planning how and where I’m going to use Anchoreum in my curriculum. It’s not often we get a fun interactive learning resource like this for such a new web feature and I think it’s worth jumping on it sooner rather than later.

Thomas prepped a video trailer for the game so I thought I’d drop that for reference.

Anchoreum: A New Game for Learning Anchor Positioning originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Developer News, Front End Web Development, Web Standards

Tim Brown: Flexible Typesetting is now yours, for free

Css Tricks - Mon, 11/11/2024 - 4:03am

Another title from A Book Apart has been re-released for free. The latest? Tim Brown’s Flexible Typesetting. I may not be the utmost expert on typography and its best practices but I do remember reading this book (it’s still on the shelf next to me!) thinking maybe, just maybe, I might be able to hold a conversation about it with Robin when I finished it.

I still think I’m in “maybe” territory but that’s not Tim’s fault — I found the book super helpful and approachable for noobs like me who want to up our game. For the sake of it, I’ll drop the chapter titles here to give you an idea of what you’ll get.

What is typsetting?
Preparing text and code (planning is definitely part of the typesetting process)
Selecting typefaces (this one helped me a lot!)
Shaping text blocks (modern CSS can help here)
Crafting compositions (great if you’re designing for long-form content)
Relieving pressure

Tim Brown: Flexible Typesetting is now yours, for free originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Developer News, Front End Web Development, Web Standards

The Different (and Modern) Ways to Toggle Content

Css Tricks - Fri, 11/08/2024 - 3:57am

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Abraham Maslow

It’s easy to default to what you know. When it comes to toggling content, that might be reaching for display: none or opacity: 0 with some JavaScript sprinkled in. But the web is more “modern” today, so perhaps now is the right time to get a birds-eye view of the different ways to toggle content — which native APIs are actually supported now, their pros and cons, and some things about them that you might not know (such as any pseudo-elements and other non-obvious stuff).

So, let’s spend some time looking at disclosures (<details> and <summary>), the Dialog API, the Popover API, and more. We’ll look at the right time to use each one depending on your needs. Modal or non-modal? JavaScript or pure HTML/CSS? Not sure? Don’t worry, we’ll go into all that.

Disclosures (<details> and <summary>)

Use case: Accessibly summarizing content while making the content details togglable independently, or as an accordion.

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Going in release order, disclosures — known by their elements as <details> and <summary> — marked the first time we were able to toggle content without JavaScript or weird checkbox hacks. But lack of web browser support obviously holds new features back at first, and this one in particular came without keyboard accessibility. So I’d understand if you haven’t used it since it came to Chrome 12 way back in 2011. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

Here’s the low-down:

It’s functional without JavaScript (without any compromises).
It’s fully stylable without appearance: none or the like.
You can hide the marker without non-standard pseudo-selectors.
You can connect multiple disclosures to create an accordion.
Aaaand… it’s fully animatable, as of 2024.

Marking up disclosures

What you’re looking for is this:

<details> <summary>Content summary (always visible)</summary> Content (visibility is toggled when summary is clicked on) </details>

Behind the scenes, the content’s wrapped in a pseudo-element that as of 2024 we can select using ::details-content. To add to this, there’s a ::marker pseudo-element that indicates whether the disclosure’s open or closed, which we can customize.

With that in mind, disclosures actually look like this under the hood:

<details> <summary><::marker></::marker>Content summary (always visible)</summary> <::details-content> Content (visibility is toggled when summary is clicked on) </::details-content> </details>

To have the disclosure open by default, give <details> the open attribute, which is what happens behind the scenes when disclosures are opened anyway.

<details open> ... </details> Styling disclosures

Let’s be real: you probably just want to lose that annoying marker. Well, you can do that by setting the display property of <summary> to anything but list-item:

summary { display: block; /* Or anything else that isn't list-item */ } CodePen Embed Fallback

Alternatively, you can modify the marker. In fact, the example below utilizes Font Awesome to replace it with another icon, but keep in mind that ::marker doesn’t support many properties. The most flexible workaround is to wrap the content of <summary> in an element and select it in CSS.

<details> <summary><span>Content summary</span></summary> Content </details> details { /* The marker */ summary::marker { content: "\f150"; font-family: "Font Awesome 6 Free"; } /* The marker when <details> is open */ &[open] summary::marker { content: "\f151"; } /* Because ::marker doesn’t support many properties */ summary span { margin-left: 1ch; display: inline-block; } } CodePen Embed Fallback Creating an accordion with multiple disclosures CodePen Embed Fallback

To create an accordion, name multiple disclosures (they don’t even have to be siblings) with a name attribute and a matching value (similar to how you’d implement <input type="radio">):

<details name="starWars" open> <summary>Prequels</summary> <ul> <li>Episode I: The Phantom Menace</li> <li>Episode II: Attack of the Clones</li> <li>Episode III: Revenge of the Sith</li> </ul> </details> <details name="starWars"> <summary>Originals</summary> <ul> <li>Episode IV: A New Hope</li> <li>Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back</li> <li>Episode VI: Return of the Jedi</li> </ul> </details> <details name="starWars"> <summary>Sequels</summary> <ul> <li>Episode VII: The Force Awakens</li> <li>Episode VIII: The Last Jedi</li> <li>Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker</li> </ul> </details>

Using a wrapper, we can even turn these into horizontal tabs:

CodePen Embed Fallback <div>  <details name="starWars" open> ... </details> <details name="starWars"> ... </details> <details name="starWars"> ... </details> </div> div { gap: 1ch; display: flex; position: relative; details { min-height: 106px; /* Prevents content shift */ &[open] summary, &[open]::details-content { background: #eee; } &[open]::details-content { left: 0; position: absolute; } } }

…or, using 2024’s Anchor Positioning API, vertical tabs (same HTML):

div { display: inline-grid; anchor-name: --wrapper; details[open] { summary, &::details-content { background: #eee; } &::details-content { position: absolute; position-anchor: --wrapper; top: anchor(top); left: anchor(right); } } } CodePen Embed Fallback

If you’re looking for some wild ideas on what we can do with the Popover API in CSS, check out John Rhea’s article in which he makes an interactive game solely out of disclosures!

Adding JavaScript functionality

Want to add some JavaScript functionality?

// Optional: select and loop multiple disclosures document.querySelectorAll("details").forEach(details => { details.addEventListener("toggle", () => { // The disclosure was toggled if (details.open) { // The disclosure was opened } else { // The disclosure was closed } }); }); Creating accessible disclosures

Disclosures are accessible as long as you follow a few rules. For example, <summary> is basically a <label>, meaning that its content is announced by screen readers when in focus. If there isn’t a <summary> or <summary> isn’t a direct child of <details> then the user agent will create a label for you that normally says “Details” both visually and in assistive tech. Older web browsers might insist that it be the first child, so it’s best to make it so.

To add to this, <summary> has the role of button, so whatever’s invalid inside a <button> is also invalid inside a <summary>. This includes headings, so you can style a <summary> as a heading, but you can’t actually insert a heading into a <summary>.

The Dialog element (<dialog>)

Use case: Modals

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Now that we have the Popover API for non-modal overlays, I think it’s best if we start to think of dialogs as modals even though the show() method does allow for non-modal dialogs. The advantage that the popover attribute has over the <dialog> element is that you can use it to create non-modal overlays without JavaScript, so in my opinion there’s no benefit to non-modal dialogs anymore, which do require JavaScript. For clarity, a modal is an overlay that makes the main document inert, whereas with non-modal overlays the main document remains interactive. There are a few other features that modal dialogs have out-of-the-box as well, including:

a stylable backdrop,
an autofocus onto the first focusable element within the <dialog> (or, as a backup, the <dialog> itself — include an aria-label in this case),
a focus trap (as a result of the main document’s inertia),
the esc key closes the dialog, and
both the dialog and the backdrop are animatable.Marking up and activating dialogs

Start with the <dialog> element:

It’s hidden by default and, similar to <details>, we can have it open when the page loads, although it isn’t modal in this scenario since it does not contain interactive content because it doesn’t opened with showModal().

I can’t say that I’ve ever needed this functionality. Instead, you’ll likely want to reveal the dialog upon some kind of interaction, such as the click of a button — so here’s that button:

<button data-dialog="dialogA">Open dialogA</button>

Wait, why are we using data attributes? Well, because we might want to hand over an identifier that tells the JavaScript which dialog to open, enabling us to add the dialog functionality to all dialogs in one snippet, like this:

// Select and loop all elements with that data attribute document.querySelectorAll("[data-dialog]").forEach(button => { // Listen for interaction (click) button.addEventListener("click", () => { // Select the corresponding dialog const dialog = document.querySelector(`#${ button.dataset.dialog }`); // Open dialog dialog.showModal(); // Close dialog dialog.querySelector(".closeDialog").addEventListener("click", () => dialog.close()); }); });

Don’t forget to add a matching id to the <dialog> so it’s associated with the <button> that shows it:

And, lastly, include the “close” button:

<dialog id="dialogA"> <button class="closeDialog">Close dialogA</button> </dialog>

Note: <form method="dialog"> (that has a <button>) or <button formmethod="dialog"> (wrapped in a <form>) also closes the dialog.

How to prevent scrolling when the dialog is open

Prevent scrolling while the modal’s open, with one line of CSS:

body:has(dialog:modal) { overflow: hidden; } Styling the dialog’s backdrop

And finally, we have the backdrop to reduce distraction from what’s underneath the top layer (this applies to modals only). Its styles can be overwritten, like this:

::backdrop { background: hsl(0 0 0 / 90%); backdrop-filter: blur(3px); /* A fun property just for backdrops! */ }

On that note, the <dialog> itself comes with a border, a background, and some padding, which you might want to reset. Actually, popovers behave the same way.

Dealing with non-modal dialogs

To implement a non-modal dialog, use:

show() instead of showModal()
dialog[open] (targets both) instead of dialog:modal

Although, as I said before, the Popover API doesn’t require JavaScript, so for non-modal overlays I think it’s best to use that.

The Popover API (<element popover>)

Use case: Non-modal overlays

CodePen Embed Fallback

Popups, basically. Suitable use cases include tooltips (or toggletips — it’s important to know the difference), onboarding walkthroughs, notifications, togglable navigations, and other non-modal overlays where you don’t want to lose access to the main document. Obviously these use cases are different to those of dialogs, but nonetheless popovers are extremely awesome. Functionally they’re just like just dialogs, but not modal and don’t require JavaScript.

Marking up popovers

To begin, the popover needs an id as well as the popover attribute with the manual value (which means clicking outside of the popover doesn’t close it), the auto value (clicking outside of the popover does close it), or no value (which means the same thing). To be semantic, the popover can be a <dialog>.

Next, add the popovertarget attribute to the <button> or <input type="button"> that we want to toggle the popover’s visibility, with a value matching the popover’s id attribute (this is optional since clicking outside of the popover will close it anyway, unless popover is set to manual):

<dialog id="tooltipA" popover> <button popovertarget="tooltipA">Hide tooltipA</button> </dialog>

Place another one of those buttons in your main document, so that you can show the popover. That’s right, popovertarget is actually a toggle (unless you specify otherwise with the popovertargetaction attribute that accepts show, hide, or toggle as its value — more on that later).

Styling popovers CodePen Embed Fallback

By default, popovers are centered within the top layer (like dialogs), but you probably don’t want them there as they’re not modals, after all.

<main> <button popovertarget="tooltipA">Show tooltipA</button> </main> <dialog id="tooltipA" popover> <button popovertarget="tooltipA">Hide tooltipA</button> </dialog>

You can easily pull them into a corner using fixed positioning, but for a tooltip-style popover you’d want it to be relative to the trigger that opens it. CSS Anchor Positioning makes this super easy:

main [popovertarget] { anchor-name: --trigger; } [popover] { margin: 0; position-anchor: --trigger; top: calc(anchor(bottom) + 10px); justify-self: anchor-center; } /* This also works but isn’t needed unless you’re using the display property [popover]:popover-open { ... } */

The problem though is that you have to name all of these anchors, which is fine for a tabbed component but overkill for a website with quite a few tooltips. Luckily, we can match an id attribute on the button to an anchor attribute on the popover, which isn’t well-supported as of November 2024 but will do for this demo:

CodePen Embed Fallback <main>  <button id="anchorA" popovertarget="tooltipA">Show tooltipA</button> <button id="anchorB" popovertarget="tooltipB">Show tooltipB</button> </main> <dialog anchor="anchorA" id="tooltipA" popover> <button popovertarget="tooltipA">Hide tooltipA</button> </dialog> <dialog anchor="anchorB" id="tooltipB" popover> <button popovertarget="tooltipB">Hide tooltipB</button> </dialog> main [popovertarget] { anchor-name: --anchorA; } /* No longer needed */ [popover] { margin: 0; position-anchor: --anchorA; /* No longer needed */ top: calc(anchor(bottom) + 10px); justify-self: anchor-center; }

The next issue is that we expect tooltips to show on hover and this doesn’t do that, which means that we need to use JavaScript. While this seems complicated considering that we can create tooltips much more easily using ::before/::after/content:, popovers allow HTML content (in which case our tooltips are actually toggletips by the way) whereas content: only accepts text.

Adding JavaScript functionality

Which leads us to this…

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Okay, so let’s take a look at what’s happening here. First, we’re using anchor attributes to avoid writing a CSS block for each anchor element. Popovers are very HTML-focused, so let’s use anchor positioning in the same way. Secondly, we’re using JavaScript to show the popovers (showPopover()) on mouseover. And lastly, we’re using JavaScript to hide the popovers (hidePopover()) on mouseout, but not if they contain a link as obviously we want them to be clickable (in this scenario, we also don’t hide the button that hides the popover).

<main> <button id="anchorLink" popovertarget="tooltipLink">Open tooltipLink</button> <button id="anchorNoLink" popovertarget="tooltipNoLink">Open tooltipNoLink</button> </main> <dialog anchor="anchorLink" id="tooltipLink" popover>Has <a href="#">a link</a>, so we can’t hide it on mouseout <button popovertarget="tooltipLink">Hide tooltipLink manually</button> </dialog> <dialog anchor="anchorNoLink" id="tooltipNoLink" popover>Doesn’t have a link, so it’s fine to hide it on mouseout automatically <button popovertarget="tooltipNoLink">Hide tooltipNoLink</button> </dialog> [popover] { margin: 0; top: calc(anchor(bottom) + 10px); justify-self: anchor-center; /* No link? No button needed */ &:not(:has(a)) [popovertarget] { display: none; } } /* Select and loop all popover triggers */ document.querySelectorAll("main [popovertarget]").forEach((popovertarget) => { /* Select the corresponding popover */ const popover = document.querySelector(`#${popovertarget.getAttribute("popovertarget")}`); /* Show popover on trigger mouseover */ popovertarget.addEventListener("mouseover", () => { popover.showPopover(); }); /* Hide popover on trigger mouseout, but not if it has a link */ if (popover.matches(":not(:has(a))")) { popovertarget.addEventListener("mouseout", () => { popover.hidePopover(); }); } }); Implementing timed backdrops (and sequenced popovers)

At first, I was sure that popovers having backdrops was an oversight, the argument being that they shouldn’t obscure a focusable main document. But maybe it’s okay for a couple of seconds as long as we can resume what we were doing without being forced to close anything? At least, I think this works well for a set of onboarding tips:

CodePen Embed Fallback  <button popovertarget="onboardingTipA" popovertargetaction="show">Restart onboarding</button>  <button popovertarget="onboardingTipA" popovertargetaction="hide">Cancel onboarding</button> <ul> <li id="toolA">Tool A</li> <li id="toolB">Tool B</li> <li id="toolC">Another tool, “C”</li> <li id="toolD">Another tool — let’s call this one “D”</li> </ul>  <dialog anchor="toolA" id="onboardingTipA" popover> onboardingTipA <button popovertarget="onboardingTipB" popovertargetaction="show">Next tip</button> </dialog>  <dialog anchor="toolB" id="onboardingTipB" popover> onboardingTipB <button popovertarget="onboardingTipC" popovertargetaction="show">Next tip</button> </dialog>  <dialog anchor="toolC" id="onboardingTipC" popover> onboardingTipC <button popovertarget="onboardingTipD" popovertargetaction="show">Next tip</button> </dialog>  <dialog anchor="toolD" id="onboardingTipD" popover> onboardingTipD <button popovertarget="onboardingTipA" popovertargetaction="hide">Finish onboarding</button> </dialog> ::backdrop { animation: 2s fadeInOut; } [popover] { margin: 0; align-self: anchor-center; left: calc(anchor(right) + 10px); } /* After users have had a couple of seconds to breathe, start the onboarding */ setTimeout(() => { document.querySelector("#onboardingTipA").showPopover(); }, 2000);

Again, let’s unpack. Firstly, setTimeout() shows the first onboarding tip after two seconds. Secondly, a simple fade-in-fade-out background animation runs on the backdrop and all subsequent backdrops. The main document isn’t made inert and the backdrop doesn’t persist, so attention is diverted to the onboarding tips while not feeling invasive.

Thirdly, each popover has a button that triggers the next onboarding tip, which triggers another, and so on, chaining them to create a fully HTML onboarding flow. Typically, showing a popover closes other popovers, but this doesn’t appear to be the case if it’s triggered from within another popover. Also, re-showing a visible popover rolls the onboarding back to that step, and, hiding a popover hides it and all subsequent popovers — although that only appears to work when popover equates to auto. I don’t fully understand it but it’s enabled me to create “restart onboarding” and “cancel onboarding” buttons.

With just HTML. And you can cycle through the tips using esc and return.

Creating modal popovers

Hear me out. If you like the HTML-ness of popover but the semantic value of <dialog>, this JavaScript one-liner can make the main document inert, therefore making your popovers modal:

document.querySelectorAll("dialog[popover]").forEach(dialog => dialog.addEventListener("toggle", () => document.body.toggleAttribute("inert")));

However, the popovers must come after the main document; otherwise they’ll also become inert. Personally, this is what I’m doing for modals anyway, as they aren’t a part of the page’s content.

<body>  </body>  <dialog popover> ... </dialog> Aaaand… breathe

Yeah, that was a lot. But…I think it’s important to look at all of these APIs together now that they’re starting to mature, in order to really understand what they can, can’t, should, and shouldn’t be used for. As a parting gift, I’ll leave you with a transition-enabled version of each API:

Sliding disclosures
Popping dialog (with fading backdrop)
Sliding popover (hamburger nav, because why not?)

The Different (and Modern) Ways to Toggle Content originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Developer News, Front End Web Development, Web Standards

Steven Heller’s Font of the Month: Roadhouse

Typography - Wed, 11/06/2024 - 1:04pm

Read the book, Typographic Firsts

This month, Steven Heller takes a closer look at the Roadhouse font family.

The post Steven Heller’s Font of the Month: Roadhouse appeared first on I Love Typography.

Categories: Front End Web Development

Popping Comments With CSS Anchor Positioning and View-Driven Animations

Css Tricks - Wed, 11/06/2024 - 5:31am

The State of CSS 2024 survey wrapped up and the results are interesting, as always. Even though each section is worth analyzing, we are usually most hyped about the section on the most used CSS features. And if you are interested in writing about web development (maybe start writing with us 😉), you will specifically want to check out the feature’s Reading List section. It holds the features that survey respondents wish to read about after completing the survey and is usually composed of up-and-coming features with low community awareness.

One of the features I was excited to see was my 2024 top pick: CSS Anchor Positioning, ranking in the survey’s Top 4. Just below, you can find Scroll-Driven Animations, another amazing feature that gained broad browser support this year. Both are elegant and offer good DX, but combining them opens up new possibilities that clearly fall into what most of us would have considered JavaScript territory just last year.

I want to show one of those possibilities while learning more about both features. Specifically, we will make the following blog post in which footnotes pop up as comments on the sides of each text.

CodePen Embed Fallback

For this demo, our requirements will be:

Pop the footnotes up when they get into the screen.
Attach them to their corresponding texts.
The footnotes are on the sides of the screen, so we need a mobile fallback.

The Foundation

To start, we will use the following everyday example of a blog post layout: title, cover image, and body of text:

CodePen Embed Fallback

The only thing to notice about the markup is that now and then we have a paragraph with a footnote at the end:

<main class="post">  <p class="note"> Super intereseting information! <span class="footnote"> A footnote about it </span> </p> </main> Positioning the Footnotes

In that demo, the footnotes are located inside the body of the post just after the text we want to note. However, we want them to be attached as floating bubbles on the side of the text. In the past, we would probably need a mix of absolute and relative positioning along with finding the correct inset properties for each footnote.

However, we can now use anchor positioning for the job, a feature that allows us to position absolute elements relative to other elements — rather than just relative to the containment context it is in. We will be talking about “anchors” and “targets” for a while, so a little terminology as we get going:

Anchor: This is the element used as a reference for positioning other elements, hence the anchor name.
Target: This is an absolutely-positioned element placed relative to one or more anchors. The target is the name we will use from now on, but you will often find it as just an “absolutely positioned element” in other resources.

I won’t get into each detail, but if you want to learn more about it I highly recommend our Anchor Positioning Guide for complete information and examples.

The Anchor and Target

It’s easy to know that each .footnote is a target element. Picking our anchor, however, requires more nuance. While it may look like each .note element should be an anchor element, it’s better to choose the whole .post as the anchor. Let me explain if we set the .footnote position to absolute:

.footnote { position: absolute; }

You will notice that the .footnote elements on the post are removed from the normal document flow and they hover visually above their .note elements. This is great news! Since they are already aligned on the vertical axis, we just have to move them on the horizontal axis onto the sides using the post as an anchor.

This is when we would need to find the correct inset property to place them on the sides. While this is doable, it’s a painful choice since:

You would have to rely on a magic number.
It depends on the viewport.
It depends on the footnote’s content since it changes its width.

Elements aren’t anchors by default, so to register the post as an anchor, we have to use the anchor-name property and give it a dashed-ident (a custom name starting with two dashes) as a name.

.post { anchor-name: --post; }

In this case, our target element would be the .footnote. To use a target element, we can keep the absolute positioning and select an anchor element using the position-anchor property, which takes the anchor’s dashed ident. This will make .post the default anchor for the target in the following step.

.footnote { position: absolute; position-anchor: --post; } Moving the Target Around

Instead of choosing an arbitrary inset value for the .footnote‘s left or right properties, we can use the anchor() function. It returns a <length> value with the position of one side of the anchor, allowing us to always set the target’s inset properties correctly. So, we can connect the left side of the target to the right side of the anchor and vice versa:

.footnote { position: absolute; position-anchor: --post; /* To place them on the right */ left: anchor(right); /* or to place them on the left*/ right: anchor(left); /* Just one of them at a time! */ }

However, you will notice that it’s stuck to the side of the post with no space in between. Luckily, the margin property works just as you are hoping it does with target elements and gives a little space between the footnote target and the post anchor. We can also add a little more styles to make things prettier:

.footnote { /* ... */ background-color: #fff; border-radius: 20px; margin: 0px 20px; padding: 20px; }

Lastly, all our .footnote elements are on the same side of the post, if we want to arrange them one on each side, we can use the nth-of-type() selector to select the even and odd notes and set them on opposite sides.

.note:nth-of-type(odd) .footnote { left: anchor(right); } .note:nth-of-type(even) .footnote { right: anchor(left); }

We use nth-of-type() instead of nth-child since we just want to iterate over .note elements and not all the siblings.

Just remember to remove the last inset declaration from .footnote, and tada! We have our footnotes on each side. You will notice I also added a little triangle on each footnote, but that’s beyond the scope of this post:

CodePen Embed Fallback The View-Driven Animation

Let’s get into making the pop-up animation. I find it the easiest part since both view and scroll-driven animation are built to be as intuitive as possible. We will start by registering an animation using an everyday @keyframes. What we want is for our footnotes to start being invisible and slowly become bigger and visible:

@keyframes pop-up { from { opacity: 0; transform: scale(0.5); } to { opacity: 1; } }

That’s our animation, now we just have to add it to each .footnote:

.footnote { /* ... */ animation: pop-up linear; }

This by itself won’t do anything. We usually would have set an animation-duration for it to start. However, view-driven animations don’t run through a set time, rather the animation progression will depend on where the element is on the screen. To do so, we set the animation-timeline to view().

.footnote { /* ... */ animation: pop-up linear; animation-timeline: view(); }

This makes the animation finish just as the element is leaving the screen. What we want is for it to finish somewhere more readable. The last touch is setting the animation-range to cover 0% cover 40%. This translates to, “I want the element to start its animation when it’s 0% in the view and end when it’s at 40% in the view.”

.footnote { /* ... */ animation: pop-up linear; animation-timeline: view(); animation-range: cover 0% cover 40%; }

This amazing tool by Bramus focused on scroll and view-driven animation better shows how the animation-range property works.

What About Mobile?

You may have noticed that this approach to footnotes doesn’t work on smaller screens since there is no space at the sides of the post. The fix is easy. What we want is for the footnotes to display as normal notes on small screens and as comments on larger screens, we can do that by making our comments only available when the screen is bigger than a certain threshold, which is about 1000px. If it isn’t, then the notes are displayed on the body of the post as any other note you may find on the web.

.footnote { display: flex; gap: 10px; border-radius: 20px; padding: 20px; background-color: #fce6c2; &::before { content: "Note:"; font-weight: 600; } } @media (width > 1000px) { /* Styles */ }

Now our comments should be displayed on the sides only when there is enough space for them:

CodePen Embed Fallback Wrapping Up

If you also like writing about something you are passionate about, you will often find yourself going into random tangents or wanting to add a comment in each paragraph for extra context. At least, that’s my case, so having a way to dynamically show comments is a great addition. Especially when we achieved using only CSS — in a way that we couldn’t just a year ago!

Popping Comments With CSS Anchor Positioning and View-Driven Animations originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Developer News, Front End Web Development, Web Standards

Fluid Everything Else

Css Tricks - Tue, 11/05/2024 - 10:49am

We all know how to do responsive design, right? We use media queries. Well no, we use container queries now, don’t we? Sometimes we get inventive with flexbox or autoflowing grids. If we’re feeling really adventurous we can reach for fluid typography.

I’m a bit uncomfortable that responsive design is often pushed into discreet chunks, like “layout A up to this size, then layout B until there’s enough space for layout C.” It’s OK, it works and fits into a workflow where screens are designed as static layouts in PhotoFigVa (caveat, I made that up). But the process feels like a compromise to me. I’ve long believed that responsive design should be almost invisible to the user. When they visit my site on a mobile device while waiting in line for K-Pop tickets, they shouldn’t notice that it’s different from just an hour ago, sitting at the huge curved gaming monitor they persuaded their boss they needed.

Consider this simple hero banner and its mobile equivalent. Sorry for the unsophisticated design. The image is AI generated, but It’s the only thing about this article that is.

The meerkat and the text are all positioned and sized differently. The traditional way to pull this off is to have two layouts, selected by a media, sorry, container query. There might be some flexibility in each layout, perhaps centering the content, and a little fluid typography on the font-size, but we’re going to choose a point at which we flip the layout in and out of the stacked version. As a result, there are likely to be widths near the breakpoint where the layout looks either a little empty or a little congested.

Is there another way?

It turns out there is. We can apply the concept of fluid typography to almost anything. This way we can have a layout that fluidly changes with the size of its parent container. Few users will ever see the transition, but they will all appreciate the results. Honestly, they will.

Let’s get this styled up

For the first step, let’s style the layouts individually, a little like we would when using width queries and a breakpoint. In fact, let’s use a container query and a breakpoint together so that we can easily see what properties need to change.

This is the markup for our hero, and it won’t change:

<div id="hero"> <div class="details"> <h1>LookOut</h1> <p>Eagle Defense System</p> </div> </div>

This is the relevant CSS for the wide version:

#hero { container-type: inline-size; max-width: 1200px; min-width: 360px; .details { position: absolute; z-index: 2; top: 220px; left: 565px; h1 { font-size: 5rem; } p { font-size: 2.5rem; } } &::before { content: ''; position: absolute; z-index: 1; top: 0; left: 0; right: 0; bottom: 0; background-image: url(../meerkat.jpg); background-origin: content-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position-x: 0; background-position-y: 0; background-size: auto 589px; } }

I’ve attached the background image to a ::before pseudo-element so I can use container queries on it (because containers cannot query themselves). We’ll keep this later on so that we can use inline container query (cqi) units. For now, here’s the container query that just shows the values we’re going to make fluid:

@container (max-width: 800px) { #hero { .details { top: 50px; left: 20px; h1 { font-size: 3.5rem; } p { font-size: 2rem; } } &::before { background-position-x: -310px; background-position-y: -25px; background-size: auto 710px; } } }

You can see the code running in a live demo — it’s entirely static to show the limitations of a typical approach.

Let’s get fluid

Now we can take those start and end points for the size and position of both the text and background and make them fluid. The text size uses fluid typography in a way you are already familiar with. Here’s the result — I’ll explain the expressions once you’ve looked at the code.

First the changes to the position and size of the text:

/* Line changes * -12,27 +12,32 */ .details { /* ... lines 14-16 unchanged */ /* Evaluates to 50px for a 360px wide container, and 220px for 1200px */ top: clamp(50px, 20.238cqi - 22.857px, 220px); /* Evaluates to 20px for a 360px wide container, and 565px for 1200px */ left: clamp(20px, 64.881cqi - 213.571px, 565px); /* ... lines 20-25 unchanged */ h1 { /* Evaluates to 3.5rem for a 360px wide container, and 5rem for 1200px */ font-size: clamp(3.5rem, 2.857rem + 2.857cqi, 5rem); /* ... font-weight unchanged */ } p { /* Evaluates to 2rem for a 360px wide container, and 2.5rem for 1200px */ font-size: clamp(2rem, 1.786rem + 0.952cqi, 2.5rem); } }

And here’s the background position and size for the meerkat image:

/* Line changes * -50,3 +55,8 */ /* Evaluates to -310px for a 360px wide container, and 0px for 1200px */ background-position-x: clamp(-310px, 36.905cqi - 442.857px, 0px); /* Evaluates to -25px for a 360px wide container, and 0px for 1200px */ background-position-y: clamp(-25px, 2.976cqi); /* Evaluates to 710px for a 360px wide container, and 589px for 1200px */ background-size: auto clamp(589px, 761.857px - 14.405cqi, 710px);

Now we can drop the container query entirely.

Let’s explain those clamp() expressions. We’ll start with the expression for the top property.

/* Evaluates to 50px for a 360px wide container, and 220px for 1200px */ top: clamp(50px, 20.238cqi - 22.857px, 220px);

You’ll have noticed there’s a comment there. These expressions are a good example of how magic numbers are a bad thing. But we can’t avoid them here, as they are the result of solving some simultaneous equations — which CSS cannot do!

The upper and lower bounds passed to clamp() are clear enough, but the expression in the middle comes from these simultaneous equations:

f + 12v = 220 f + 3.6v = 50

…where f is the number of fixed-size length units (i.e., px) and v is the variable-sized unit (cqi). In the first equation, we are saying that we want the expression to evaluate to 220px when 1cqi is equal to 12px. In the second equation, we’re saying we want 50px when 1cqi is 3.6px, which solves to:

f = -22.857 v = 20.238

…and this tidies up to 20.238cqi – 22.857px in a calc()-friendly expression.

When the fixed unit is different, we must change the size of the variable units accordingly. So for the <h1> element’s font-size we have;

/* Evaluates to 2rem for a 360px wide container, and 2.5rem for 1200px */ font-size: clamp(2rem, 1.786rem + 0.952cqi, 2.5rem);

This is solving these equations because, at a container width of 1200px, 1cqi is the same as 0.75rem (my rems are relative to the default UA stylesheet, 16px), and at 360px wide, 1cqi is 0.225rem.

f + 0.75v = 2.5 f + 0.225v = 2

This is important to note: The equations are different depending on what unit you are targeting.

Honestly, this is boring math to do every time, so I made a calculator you can use. Not only does it solve the equations for you (to three decimal places to keep your CSS clean) it also provides that helpful comment to use alongside the expression so that you can see where they came from and avoid magic numbers. Feel free to use it. Yes, there are many similar calculators out there, but they concentrate on typography, and so (rightly) fixate on rem units. You could probably port the JavaScript if you’re using a CSS preprocessor.

The clamp() function isn’t strictly necessary at this point. In each case, the bounds of clamp() are set to the values of when the container is either 360px or 1200px wide. Since the container itself is constrained to those limits — by setting min-width and max-width values — the clamp() expression should never invoke either bound. However, I prefer to keep clamp() there in case we ever change our minds (which we are about to do) because implicit bounds like these are difficult to spot and maintain.

Avoiding injury

We could consider our work finished, but we aren’t. The layout still doesn’t quite work. The text passes right over the top of the meerkat’s head. While I have been assured this causes the meerkat no harm, I don’t like the look of it. So, let’s make some changes to make the text avoid hitting the meerkat.

The first is simple. We’ll move the meerkat to the left more quickly so that it gets out of the way. This is done most easily by changing the lower end of the interpolation to a wider container. We’ll set it so that the meerkat is fully left by 450px rather than down to 360px. There’s no reason the start and end points for all of our fluid expressions need to align with the same widths, so we can keep the other expressions fluid down to 360px.

Using my trusty calculator, all we need to do is change the clamp() expressions for the background-position properties:

/* Line changes * -55,5 +55,5 */ /* Evaluates to -310px for a 450px wide container, and 0px for 1200px */ background-position-x: clamp(-310px, 41.333cqi - 496px, 0px); /* Evaluates to -25px for a 450px wide container, and 0px for 1200px */ background-position-y: clamp(-25px, 3.333cqi - 40px, 0px);

This improves things, but not totally. I don’t want to move it any quicker, so next we’ll look at the path the text takes. At the moment it moves in a straight line, like this:

But can we bend it? Yes, we can.

A Bend in the path

One way we can do this is by defining two different interpolations for the top coordinate that places the line at different angles and then choosing the smallest one. This way, it allows the steeper line to “win” at larger container widths, and the shallower line becomes the value that wins when the container is narrower than about 780px. The result is a line with a bend that misses the meerkat.

All we’re changing is the top value, but we must calculate two intermediate values first:

/* Line changes * -18,2 +18,9 @@ */ /* Evaluates to 220px for a 1200px wide container, and -50px for 360px */ --top-a: calc(32.143cqi - 165.714px); /* Evaluates to 120px for a 1200px wide container, and 50px for 360px */ --top-b: calc(20px + 8.333cqi); /* By taking the max, --topA is used at lower widths, with --topB taking over when wider. We only need to apply clamp when the value is actually used */ top: clamp(50px, max(var(--top-a), var(--top-b)), 220px);

For these values, rather than calculating them formally using a carefully chosen midpoint, I experimented with the endpoints until I got the result I wanted. Experimentation is just as valid as calculation as a way of getting the result you need. In this case, I started with duplicates of the interpolation in custom variables. I could have split the path into explicit sections using a container query, but that doesn’t reduce the math overhead, and using the min() function is cleaner to my eye. Besides, this article isn’t strictly about container queries, is it?

Now the text moves along this path. Open up the live demo to see it in action.

CSS can’t do everything

As a final note on the calculations, it’s worth pointing out that there are restrictions as far as what we can and can’t do. The first, which we have already mitigated a little, is that these interpolations are linear. This means that easing in or out, or other complex behavior, is not possible.

Another major restriction is that CSS can only generate length values this way, so there is no way in pure CSS to apply, for example, opacity or a rotation angle that is fluid based on the container or viewport size. Preprocessors can’t help us here either because the limitation is on the way calc() works in the browser.

Both of these restrictions can be lifted if you’re prepared to rely on a little JavaScript. A few lines to observe the width of the container and set a CSS custom property that is unitless is all that’s needed. I’m going to use that to make the text follow a quadratic Bezier curve, like this:

There’s too much code to list here, and too much math to explain the Bezier curve, but go take a look at it in action in this live demo.

We wouldn’t even need JavaScript if expressions like calc(1vw / 1px) didn’t fail in CSS. There is no reason for them to fail since they represent a ratio between two lengths. Just as there are 2.54cm in 1in, there are 8px in 1vw when the viewport is 800px wide, so calc(1vw / 1px) should evaluate to a unitless 8 value.

They do fail though, so all we can do is state our case and move on.

Fluid everything doesn’t solve all layouts

There will always be some layouts that need size queries, of course; some designs will simply need to snap changes at fixed breakpoints. There is no reason to avoid that if it’s right. There is also no reason to avoid mixing the two, for example, by fluidly sizing and positioning the background while using a query to snap between grid definitions for the text placement. My meerkat example is deliberately contrived to be simple for the sake of demonstration.

One thing I’ll add is that I’m rather excited by the possibility of using the new Anchor Positioning API for fluid positioning. There’s the possibility of using anchor positioning to define how two elements might flow around the screen together, but that’s for another time.

Fluid Everything Else originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Developer News, Front End Web Development, Web Standards

Web-Slinger.css: Like Wow.js But With CSS-y Scroll Animations

Css Tricks - Fri, 11/01/2024 - 4:00am

We had fun in my previous article exploring the goodness of scrolly animations supported in today’s versions of Chrome and Edge (and behind a feature flag in Firefox for now). Those are by and large referred to as “scroll-driven” animations. However, “scroll triggering” is something the Chrome team is still working on. It refers to the behavior you might have seen in the wild in which a point of no return activates a complete animation like a trap after our hapless scrolling user ventures past a certain point. You can see JavaScript examples of this on the Wow.js homepage which assembles itself in a sequence of animated entrances as you scroll down. There is no current official CSS solution for scroll-triggered animations — but Ryan Mulligan has shown how we can make it work by cleverly combining the animation-timeline property with custom properties and style queries.

That is a very cool way to combine new CSS features. But I am not done being overly demanding toward the awesome emergent animation timeline technology I didn’t know existed before I read up on it last month. I noticed scroll timelines and view timelines are geared toward animations that play backward when you scroll back up, unlike the Wow.js example where the dogs roll in and then stay. Bramus mentions the same point in his exploration of scroll-triggered animations. The animations run in reverse when scrolling back up. This is not always feasible. As a divorced Dad, I can attest that the Tinder UI is another example of a pattern in which scrolling and swiping can have irreversible consequences.

Scroll till the cows come home with Web-Slinger.css

Believe it or not, with a small amount of SCSS and no JavaScript, we can build a pure CSS replacement of the Wow.js library, which I hereby christen “Web-Slinger.css.” It feels good to use the scroll-driven optimized standards already supported by some major browsers to make a prototype library. Here’s the finished demo and then we will break down how it works. I have always enjoyed the deliberately lo-fi aesthetic of the original Wow.js page, so it’s nice to have an excuse to create a parody. Much profession, so impress.

CodePen Embed Fallback Teach scrolling elements to roll over and stay

Web-Slinger.css introduces a set of class names in the format .scroll-trigger-n and .on-scroll-trigger-n. It also defines --scroll-trigger-n custom properties, which are inherited from the document root so we can access them from any CSS class. These conventions are more verbose than Wow.js but also more powerful. The two types of CSS classes decouple the triggers of our one-off animations from the elements they trigger, which means we can animate anything on the page based on the user reaching any scroll marker.

Here’s a basic example that triggers the A nimate.css animation “flipInY” when the user has scrolled to the <div> marked as .scroll-trigger-8.

A more advanced use is the sticky “Cownter” (trademark pending) at the top of the demo page, which takes advantage of the ability of one trigger to activate an arbitrary number of animations anywhere in the document. The Cownter increments as new cows appear then displays a reset button once we reach the final scroll trigger at the bottom of the page.

Here is the markup for the Cownter:

<div class="header"> <h2 class="cownter"></h2> <div class="animate__animated animate__backInDown on-scroll-trigger-12"> <br> <a href="#" class="reset">🔁 Play again</a> </div> </div>

…and the CSS:

.header { .cownter::after { --cownter: calc(var(--scroll-trigger-2) + var(--scroll-trigger-4) + var(--scroll-trigger-8) + var(--scroll-trigger-11)); --pluralised-cow: 'cows'; counter-set: cownter var(--cownter); content: "Have " counter(cownter) " " var(--pluralised-cow) ", man"; } @container style(--scroll-trigger-2: 1) and style(--scroll-trigger-4: 0) { .cownter::after { --pluralised-cow: 'cow'; } } a { text-decoration: none; color:blue; } } :root:has(.reset:active) * { animation-name: none; }

The demo CodePen references Web-Slinger.css from a separate CodePen, which I reference in my final demo the same way I would an external resource.

Sidenote: If you have doubts about the utility of style queries, behold the age-old cow pluralization problem solved in pure CSS.

How does Web Slinger like to sling it?

The secret is based on an iconic thought experiment by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who once asked: If the view() function lets you style an element once it comes into view, what if you take that opportunity to style it so it can never be scrolled out of view? Would that element not stare back into you for eternity?

.scroll-trigger { animation-timeline: view(); animation-name: stick-to-the-top; animation-fill-mode: both; animation-duration: 1ms; } @keyframes stick-to-the-top { .1%, to { position: fixed; top: 0; } }

This idea sounded too good to be true, reminiscent of the urge when you meet a genie to ask for unlimited wishes. But it works! The next puzzle piece is how to use this one-way animation technique to control something we’d want to display to the user. Divs that instantly stick to the ceiling as soon as they enter the viewport might have their place on a page discussing the movie Alien, but most of the time this type of animation won’t be something we want the user to see.

That’s where named view progress timelines come in. The empty scroll trigger element only has the job of sticking to the top of the viewport as soon as it enters. Next, we set the timeline-scope property of the <body> element so that it matches the sticky element’s view-timeline-name. Now we can apply Ryan’s toggle custom property and style query tricks to let each sticky element trigger arbitrary one-off animations anywhere on the page!

View CSS code /** Each trigger element will cause a toggle named with * the convention `--scroll-trigger-n` to be flipped * from 0 to 1, which will unpause the animation on * any element with the class .on-scroll-trigger-n **/ :root { animation-name: run-scroll-trigger-1, run-scroll-trigger-2 /*etc*/; animation-duration: 1ms; animation-fill-mode: forwards; animation-timeline: --trigger-timeline-1, --trigger-timeline-2 /*etc*/; timeline-scope: --trigger-timeline-1, --trigger-timeline-2 /*etc*/; } @property --scroll-trigger-1 { syntax: "<integer>"; initial-value: 0; inherits: true; } @keyframes run-scroll-trigger-1 { to { --scroll-trigger-1: 1; } } /** Add this class to arbitrary elements we want * to only animate once `.scroll-trigger-1` has come * into view, default them to paused state otherwise **/ .on-scroll-trigger-1 { animation-play-state: paused; } /** The style query hack will run the animations on * the element once the toggle is set to true **/ @container style(--scroll-trigger-1: 1) { .on-scroll-trigger-1 { animation-play-state: running; } } /** The trigger element which sticks to the top of * the viewport and activates the one-way animation * that will unpause the animation on the * corresponding element marked with `.on-scroll-trigger-n` **/ .scroll-trigger-1 { view-timeline-name: --trigger-timeline-1; } Trigger warning

We generate the genericized Web-Slinger.css in 95 lines of SCSS, which isn’t too bad. The drawback is that the more triggers we need, the larger the compiled CSS file. The numbered CSS classes also aren’t semantic, so it would be great to have native support for linking a scroll-triggered element to its trigger based on IDs, reminiscent of the popovertarget attribute for HTML buttons — except this hypothetical attribute would go on each target element and specify the ID of the trigger, which is the opposite of the way popovertarget works.

<scroll-trigger id="my-scroll-trigger"></scroll-trigger> <div class="rollIn" scrolltrigger="my-scroll-trigger">Hello world</div> Do androids dream of standardized scroll triggers?

As I mentioned at the start, Bramus has teased that scroll-triggered animations are something we’d like to ship in a future version of Chrome, but it still needs a bit of work before we can do that. I’m looking forward to standardized scroll-triggered animations built into the browser. We could do worse than a convention resembling Web-Slinger.css for declaratively defining scroll-triggered animations, but I know I am not objective about Web Slinger as its creator. It’s become a bit of a sacred cow for me so I shall stop milking the topic — for now.

Feel free to reference the prototype Web-Slinger.css library in your experimental CodePens, or fork the library itself if you have better ideas about how scroll-triggered animations could be standardized.

Web-Slinger.css: Like Wow.js But With CSS-y Scroll Animations originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Developer News, Front End Web Development, Web Standards

State of CSS 2024 Results

Css Tricks - Wed, 10/30/2024 - 6:43am

They’re out! Like many of you, I look forward to these coming out each year. I don’t put much stock in surveys but they can be insightful and give a snapshot of the CSS zeitgeist. There are a few little nuggets in this year’s results that I find interesting. But before I get there, you’ll want to also check out what others have already written about it.

Josh Comeau digested his takeaways in a recent newsletter.

Oh, I guess that’s it — at least it’s the most formal write-up I’ve seen. There’s a little summary by Ahmad Shadeed at the end of the survey that generally rounds things up. I’ll drop in more links as I find ’em.

In no particular order…

Demographics

Josh has way more poignant thoughts on this than I do. He rightfully calls out discrepancies in gender pay and regional pay, where men are way more compensated than women (a nonsensical and frustratingly never-ending trend) and the United States boasts more $100,000 salaries than anywhere else. The countries with the highest salaries were also the most represented in survey responses, so perhaps the results are no surprise. We’re essentially looking at a snapshot of what it’s like to be a rich, white male developer in the West.

Besides pay, my eye caught the Age Group demographics. As an aging front-ender, I often wonder what we all do when we finally get to retirement age. I officially dropped from the most represented age group (30-39, 42%) a few years ago into the third most represented tier (40-49, 21%). Long gone are my days being with the cool kids (20-29, 27%).

And if the distribution is true to life, I’m riding fast into my sunset years and will be only slightly more represented than those getting into the profession. I don’t know if anyone else feels similarly anxious about aging in this industry — but if you’re one of the 484 folks who identify with the 50+ age group, I’d love to talk with you.

Before we plow ahead, I think it’s worth calling out how relatively “new” most people are to front-end development.

Wow! Forty-freaking-four percent of respondents have less than 10 years of experience. Yes, 10 years is a high threshold, but we’re still talking about a profession that popped up in recent memory.

For perspective, someone developing for 10 years came to the field around 2014. That’s just when we were getting Flexbox, and several years after the big bang of CSS 3 and HTML 5. That’s just under half of developers who never had to deal with the headaches of table layouts, clearfix hacks, image sprites, spacer images, and rasterized rounded corners. Ethan Marcotte’s seminal article on “Responsive Web Design” predates these folks by a whopping four years!

That’s just wild. And exciting. I’m a firm believer in the next generation of front-enders but always hope that they learn from our past mistakes and become masters at the basics.

Features

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this section. When there are so many CSS features, how do you determine which are most widely used? How do you pare it down to just 50 features? Like, are filter effects really the most widely used CSS feature? So many questions, but the results are always interesting nonetheless.

What I find most interesting are the underused features. For example, hanging-punctuation comes in dead last in usage (1.57%) but is the feature that most developers (52%) have on their reading list. (If you need some reading material on it, Chris initially published the Almanac entry for hanging-punctuation back in 2013.)

I also see Anchor Positioning at the end of the long tail with reported usage at 4.8%. That’ll go up for sure now that we have at least one supporting browser engine (Chromium) but also given all of the tutorials that have sprung up in the past few months. Yes, we’ve contributed to that noise… but it’s good noise! I think Juan published what might be the most thorough and thoughtful guide on the topic yet.

I’m excited to see Cascade Layers falling smack dab in the middle of the pack at a fairly robust 18.7%. Cascade Layers are super approachable and elegantly designed that I have trouble believing anybody these days when they say that the CSS Cascade is difficult to manage. And even though @scope is currently low on the list (4.8%, same as Anchor Positioning), I’d bet the crumpled gum wrapper in my pocket that the overall sentiment of working with the Cascade will improve dramatically. We’ll still see “CSS is Awesome” memes galore, but they’ll be more like old familiar dad jokes in good time.

(Aside: Did you see the proposed designs for a new CSS logo? You can vote on them as of yesterday, but earlier versions played off the “CSS is Awesome” mean quite beautifully.)

Interestingly enough, viewport units come in at Number 11 with 44.2% usage… which lands them at Number 2 for most experience that developers have with CSS layout. Does that suggest that layout features are less widely used than CSS filters? Again, so many questions.

Frameworks

How many of you were surprised that Tailwind blew past Bootstrap as Top Dog framework in CSS Land? Nobody, right?

More interesting to me is that “No CSS framework” clocks in at Number 13 out of 21 list frameworks. Sure, its 46 votes are dwarfed by the 138 for Material UI at Number 10… but the fact that we’re seeing “no framework” as a ranking option at all would have been unimaginable just three years ago.

The same goes for CSS pre/post-processing. Sass (67%) and PostCSS (38%) are the power players, but “None” comes in third at 19%, ahead of Less, Stylus, and Lightning CSS.

It’s a real testament to the great work the CSSWG is doing to make CSS better every day. We don’t thank the CSSWG enough — thank you, team! Y’all are heroes around these parts.

CSS Usage

Josh already has a good take on the fact that only 67% of folks say they test their work on mobile phones. It should be at least tied with the 99% who test on desktops, right? Right?! Who knows, maybe some responses consider things like “Responsive Design Mode” desktop features to be the equivalent of testing on real mobile devices. I find it hard to believe that only 67% of us test mobile.

Oh, and The Great Divide is still alive and well if the results are true and 53% write more JavsScript than CSS in their day-to-day.

Missing CSS Features

This is always a fun topic to ponder. Some of the most-wanted CSS features have been lurking around 10+ years. But let’s look at the top three form this year’s survey:

Mixins
Conditional Logic
Masonry

We’re in luck team! There’s movement on all three of those fronts:

A new CSS Functions and Mixins Module draft was published in late June after the CSSWG resolved to adopt the proposal back in February. (Read our notes.)
The CSS Working Group (CSSWG) resolved to add an if() conditional to the CSS Values Module Level 5 specification. (Read our notes.)
There are competing proposals for how to forge ahead with a CSS-y approach to masonry layouts. One is based on the CSS Grid Layout Module Level 3 draft specifcation and the other is a fresh new module dedicated to masonry. Apple has planted its flag. So has Chrome. Let the cage-match continue!

Resources

This is where I get to toot our own horn a bit because CSS-Tricks continues to place first among y’all when it comes to the blogs you follow for CSS happenings.

I’m also stoked to see Smashing Magazine right there as well. It was fifth in 2023 and I’d like to think that rise is due to me joining the team last year. Correlation implies causation, amirite?

But look at Kevin Powell and Josh in the Top 10. That’s just awesome. It speaks volumes about their teaching talents and the hard work they put into “helping people fall in love with CSS” as Kevin might say it. I was able to help Kevin with a couple of his videos last year (here’s one) and can tell you the guy cares a heckuva lot about making CSS approachable and fun.

Honestly, the rankings are not what we live for. Now that I’ve been given a second wind to work on CSS-Tricks, all I want is to publish things that are valuable to your everyday work as front-enders. That’s traditionally happened as a stream of daily articles but is shifting to more tutorials and resources, whether it’s guides (we’ve published four new ones this year), taking notes on interesting developments, spotlighting good work with links, or expanding the ol’ Almanac to account for things like functions, at-rules, and pseudos (we have lots of work to do).

My 2024 Pick

No one asked my opinion but I’ll say it anyway: Personal blogging. I’m seeing more of us in the front-end community getting back behind the keyboards of their personal websites and I’ve never been subscribed to more RSS feeds than I am today. Some started blogging as a “worry stone” during the 2020 lockdown. Some abandoned socials when Twitter X imploded. Some got way into the IndieWeb. Webrings and guestbooks are even gaining new life. Sure, it can be tough keeping up, but what a good problem to have! Let’s make RSS king once and for all.

That’s a wrap!

Seriously, a huge thanks to Sacha Greif and the entire Devographics team for the commitment to putting this survey together every year. It’s always fun. And the visualizations are always to die for.

State of CSS 2024 Results originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Developer News, Front End Web Development, Web Standards

New business wanted

QuirksBlog - Thu, 09/30/2021 - 12:22am

Last week Krijn and I decided to cancel performance.now() 2021. Although it was the right decision it leaves me in financially fairly dire straits. So I’m looking for new jobs and/or donations.

Even though the Corona trends in NL look good, and we could probably have brought 350 people together in November, we cannot be certain: there might be a new flare-up. More serious is the fact that it’s very hard to figure out how to apply the Corona checks Dutch government requires, especially for non-EU citizens. We couldn’t figure out how UK and US people should be tested, and for us that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Cancelling the conference relieved us of a lot of stress.

Still, it also relieved me of a lot of money. This is the fourth conference in a row we cannot run, and I have burned through all my reserves. That’s why I thought I’d ask for help.

So ...

Has QuirksMode.org ever saved you a lot of time on a project? Did it advance your career? If so, now would be a great time to make a donation to show your appreciation.

I am trying my hand at CSS coaching. Though I had only few clients so far I found that I like it and would like to do it more. As an added bonus, because I’m still writing my CSS for JavaScripters book I currently have most of the CSS layout modules in my head and can explain them straight away — even stacking contexts.

Or if there’s any job you know of that requires a technical documentation writer with a solid knowledge of web technologies and the browser market, drop me a line. I’m interested.

Anyway, thanks for listening.

Categories: Front End Web Development, Web Standards

position: sticky, draft 1

QuirksBlog - Wed, 09/08/2021 - 7:44am

I’m writing the position: sticky part of my book, and since I never worked with sticky before I’m not totally sure if what I’m saying is correct.

This is made worse by the fact that there are no very clear tutorials on sticky. That’s partly because it works pretty intuitively in most cases, and partly because the details can be complicated.

So here’s my draft 1 of position: sticky. There will be something wrong with it; please correct me where needed.

The inset properties are top, right, bottom and left. (I already introduced this terminology earlier in the chapter.)

h3,h4,pre {clear: left} section.scroll-container { border: 1px solid black; width: 300px; height: 250px; padding: 1em; overflow: auto; --text: 'scroll box'; float: left; clear: left; margin-right: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; position: relative; font-size: 1.3rem; } .container,.outer-container { border: 1px solid black; padding: 1em; position: relative; --text: 'container'; } .outer-container { --text: 'outer container'; } :is(.scroll-container,.container,.outer-container):before { position: absolute; content: var(--text); top: 0.2em; left: 0.2em; font-size: 0.8rem; } section.scroll-container h2 { position: sticky; top: 0; background: white; margin: 0 !important; color: inherit !important; padding: 0.5em !important; border: 1px solid; font-size: 1.4rem !important; } .nowrap p { white-space: nowrap; } Introduction

position: sticky is a mix of relative and fixed. A sticky box takes its normal position in the flow, as if it had position: relative, but if that position scrolls out of view the sticky box remains in a position defined by its inset properties, as if it has position: fixed. A sticky box never escapes its container, though. If the container start or end scrolls past the sticky box abandons its fixed position and sticks to the top or the bottom of its container.

It is typically used to make sure that headers remain in view no matter how the user scrolls. It is also useful for tables on narrow screens: you can keep headers or the leftmost table cells in view while the user scrolls.

Scroll box and container

A sticky box needs a scroll box: a box that is able to scroll. By default this is the browser window — or, more correctly, the layout viewport — but you can define another scroll box by setting overflow on the desired element. The sticky box takes the first ancestor that could scroll as its scroll box and calculates all its coordinates relative to it.

A sticky box needs at least one inset property. These properties contain vital instructions, and if the sticky box doesn’t receive them it doesn’t know what to do.

A sticky box may also have a container: a regular HTML element that contains the sticky box. The sticky box will never be positioned outside this container, which thus serves as a constraint.

The first example shows this set-up. The sticky <h2> is in a perfectly normal <div>, its container, and that container is in a <section> that is the scroll box because it has overflow: auto. The sticky box has an inset property to provide instructions. The relevant styles are:

section.scroll-container { border: 1px solid black; width: 300px; height: 300px; overflow: auto; padding: 1em; } div.container { border: 1px solid black; padding: 1em; } section.scroll-container h2 { position: sticky; top: 0; } The rules Sticky header

Regular content

Content outside container

Now let’s see exactly what’s going on.

A sticky box never escapes its containing box. If it cannot obey the rules that follow without escaping from its container, it instead remains at the edge. Scroll down until the container disappears to see this in action.

A sticky box starts in its natural position in the flow, as if it has position: relative. It thus participates in the default flow: if it becomes higher it pushes the paragraphs below it downwards, just like any other regular HTML element. Also, the space it takes in the normal flow is kept open, even if it is currently in fixed position. Scroll down a little bit to see this in action: an empty space is kept open for the header.

A sticky box compares two positions: its natural position in the flow and its fixed position according to its inset properties. It does so in the coordinate frame of its scroll box. That is, any given coordinate such as top: 20px, as well as its default coordinates, is resolved against the content box of the scroll box. (In other words, the scroll box’s padding also constrains the sticky box; it will never move up into that padding.)

A sticky box with top takes the higher value of its top and its natural position in the flow, and positions its top border at that value. Scroll down slowly to see this in action: the sticky box starts at its natural position (let’s call it 20px), which is higher than its defined top (0). Thus it rests at its position in the natural flow. Scrolling up a few pixels doesn’t change this, but once its natural position becomes less than 0, the sticky box switches to a fixed layout and stays at that position.

The sticky box has bottom: 0

Regular content

Sticky header

Content outside container

It does the same for bottom, but remember that a bottom is calculated relative to the scroll box’s bottom, and not its top. Thus, a larger bottom coordinate means the box is positioned more to the top. Now the sticky box compares its default bottom with the defined bottom and uses the higher value to position its bottom border, just as before.

With left, it uses the higher value of its natural position and to position its left border; with right, it does the same for its right border, bearing in mind once more that a higher right value positions the box more to the left.

If any of these steps would position the sticky box outside its containing box it takes the position that just barely keeps it within its containing box.

Details Sticky header

Very, very long line of content to stretch up the container quite a bit

Regular content

Content outside container

The four inset properties act independently of one another. For instance the following box will calculate the position of its top and left edge independently. They can be relative or fixed, depending on how the user scrolls.

p.testbox { position: sticky; top: 0; left: 0; }

Content outside container

The sticky box has top: 0; bottom: 0

Regular content

Sticky header

Regular content

Content outside container

Setting both a top and a bottom, or both a left and a right, gives the sticky box a bandwidth to move in. It will always attempt to obey all the rules described above. So the following box will vary between 0 from the top of the screen to 0 from the bottom, taking its default position in the flow between these two positions.

p.testbox { position: sticky; top: 0; bottom: 0; } No container

Regular content

Sticky header

Regular content

So far we put the sticky box in a container separate from the scroll box. But that’s not necessary. You can also make the scroll box itself the container if you wish. The sticky element is still positioned with respect to the scroll box (which is now also its container) and everything works fine.

Several containers Sticky header

Regular content

Content outside container

Content outside outer container

Or the sticky item can be several containers removed from its scroll box. That’s fine as well; the positions are still calculated relative to the scroll box, and the sticky box will never leave its innermost container.

Changing the scroll box Sticky header

The container has overflow: auto.

Regular content

Content outside container

One feature that catches many people (including me) unaware is giving the container an overflow: auto or hidden. All of a sudden it seems the sticky header doesn’t work any more.

What’s going on here? An overflow value of auto, hidden, or scroll makes an element into a scroll box. So now the sticky box’s scroll box is no longer the outer element, but the inner one, since that is now the closest ancestor that is able to scroll.

The sticky box appears to be static, but it isn’t. The crux here is that the scroll box could scroll, thanks to its overflow value, but doesn’t actually do so because we didn’t give it a height, and therefore it stretches up to accomodate all of its contents.

Thus we have a non-scrolling scroll box, and that is the root cause of our problems.

As before, the sticky box calculates its position by comparing its natural position relative to its scroll box with the one given by its inset properties. Point is: the sticky box doesn’t scroll relative to its scroll box, so its position always remains the same. Where in earlier examples the position of the sticky element relative to the scroll box changed when we scrolled, it no longer does so, because the scroll box doesn’t scroll. Thus there is no reason for it to switch to fixed positioning, and it stays where it is relative to its scroll box.

The fact that the scroll box itself scrolls upward is irrelevant; this doesn’t influence the sticky box in the slightest.

Sticky header

Regular content

Content outside container

One solution is to give the new scroll box a height that is too little for its contents. Now the scroll box generates a scrollbar and becomes a scrolling scroll box. When we scroll it the position of the sticky box relative to its scroll box changes once more, and it switches from fixed to relative or vice versa as required.

Minor items

Finally a few minor items:

It is no longer necessary to use position: -webkit-sticky. All modern browsers support regular position: sticky. (But if you need to cater to a few older browsers, retaining the double syntax doesn’t hurt.)
Chrome (Mac) does weird things to the borders of the sticky items in these examples. I don’t know what’s going on and am not going to investigate.

Categories: Front End Web Development, Web Standards

Breaking the web forward

QuirksBlog - Thu, 08/12/2021 - 5:19am

Safari is holding back the web. It is the new IE, after all. In contrast, Chrome is pushing the web forward so hard that it’s starting to break. Meanwhile web developers do nothing except moan and complain. The only thing left to do is to pick our poison.

blockquote { font-size: inherit; font-family: inherit; } blockquote p { font-size: inherit; font-family: inherit; } Safari is the new IE

Recently there was yet another round of “Safari is the new IE” stories. Once Jeremy’s summary and a short discussion cleared my mind I finally figured out that Safari is not IE, and that Safari’s IE-or-not-IE is not the worst problem the web is facing.

Perry Sun argues that for developers, Safari is crap and outdated, emulating the old IE of fifteen years ago in this respect. He also repeats the theory that Apple is deliberately starving Safari of features in order to protect the app store, and thus its bottom line. We’ll get back to that.

The allegation that Safari is holding back web development by its lack of support for key features is not new, but it’s not true, either. Back fifteen years ago IE held back the web because web developers had to cater to its outdated technology stack. “Best viewed with IE” and all that. But do you ever see a “Best viewed with Safari” notice? No, you don’t. Another browser takes that special place in web developers’ hearts and minds.

Chrome is the new IE, but in reverse

Jorge Arango fears we’re going back to the bad old days with “Best viewed in Chrome.” Chris Krycho reinforces this by pointing out that, even though Chrome is not the standard, it’s treated as such by many web developers.

“Best viewed in Chrome” squares very badly with “Safari is the new IE.” Safari’s sad state does not force web developers to restrict themselves to Safari-supported features, so it does not hold the same position as IE.

So I propose to lay this tired old meme to rest. Safari is not the new IE. If anything it’s the new Netscape 4.

Meanwhile it is Chrome that is the new IE, but in reverse.

Break the web forward

Back in the day, IE was accused of an embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy. After IE6 Microsoft did nothing for ages, assuming it had won the web. Thanks to web developers taking action in their own name for the first (and only) time, IE was updated once more and the web moved forward again.

Google learned from Microsoft’s mistakes and follows a novel embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy by breaking the web and stomping on the bits. Who cares if it breaks as long as we go forward. And to hell with backward compatibility.

Back in 2015 I proposed to stop pushing the web forward, and as expected the Chrome devrels were especially outraged at this idea. It never went anywhere. (Truth to tell: I hadn’t expected it to.)

I still think we should stop pushing the web forward for a while until we figure out where we want to push the web forward to — but as long as Google is in charge that won’t happen. It will only get worse.

On alert

A blog storm broke out over the decision to remove alert(), confirm() and prompt(), first only the cross-origin variants, but eventually all of them. Jeremy and Chris Coyier already summarised the situation, while Rich Harris discusses the uses of the three ancient modals, especially when it comes to learning JavaScript.

With all these articles already written I will only note that, if the three ancient modals are truly as horrendous a security issue as Google says they are it took everyone a bloody long time to figure that out. I mean, they turn 25 this year.

Although it appears Firefox and Safari are on board with at least the cross-origin part of the proposal, there is no doubt that it’s Google that leads the charge.

From Google’s perspective the ancient modals have one crucial flaw quite apart from their security model: they weren’t invented there. That’s why they have to be replaced by — I don’t know what, but it will likely be a very complicated API.

Complex systems and arrogant priests rule the web

Thus the new embrace, extend, and extinguish is breaking backward compatibility in order to make the web more complicated. Nolan Lawson puts it like this:

we end up with convoluted specs like Service Worker that you need a PhD to understand, and yet we still don't have a working <dialog> element.

In addition, Google can be pretty arrogant and condescending, as Chris Ferdinandi points out.

The condescending “did you actually read it, it’s so clear” refrain is patronizing AF. It’s the equivalent of “just” or “simply” in developer documentation.

I read it. I didn’t understand it. That’s why I asked someone whose literal job is communicating with developers about changes Chrome makes to the platform.

This is not isolated to one developer at Chrome. The entire message thread where this change was surfaced is filled with folks begging Chrome not to move forward with this proposal because it will break all-the-things.

If you write documentation or a technical article and nobody understands it, you’ve done a crappy job. I should know; I’ve been writing this stuff for twenty years.

Extend, embrace, extinguish. And use lots of difficult words.

Patience is a virtue

As a reaction to web dev outcry Google temporarily halted the breaking of the web. That sounds great but really isn’t. It’s just a clever tactical move.

I saw this tactic in action before. Back in early 2016 Google tried to break the de-facto standard for the mobile visual viewport that I worked very hard to establish. I wrote a piece that resonated with web developers, whose complaints made Google abandon the plan — temporarily. They tried again in late 2017, and I again wrote an article, but this time around nobody cared and the changes took effect and backward compatibility was broken.

So the three ancient modals still have about 12 to 18 months to live. Somewhere in late 2022 to early 2023 Google will try again, web developers will be silent, and the modals will be gone.

The pursuit of appiness

But why is Google breaking the web forward at such a pace? And why is Apple holding it back?

Safari is kept dumb to protect the app store and thus revenue. In contrast, the Chrome team is pushing very hard to port every single app functionality to the browser. Ages ago I argued we should give up on this, but of course no one listened.

When performing Valley Kremlinology, it is useful to see Google policies as stemming from a conflict between internal pro-web and anti-web factions. We web developers mainly deal with the pro-web faction, the Chrome devrel and browser teams. On the other hand, the Android team is squarely in the anti-web camp.

When seen in this light the pro-web camp’s insistence on copying everything appy makes excellent sense: if they didn’t Chrome would lag behind apps and the Android anti-web camp would gain too much power. While I prefer the pro-web over the anti-web camp, I would even more prefer the web not to be a pawn in an internal Google power struggle. But it has come to that, no doubt about it.

Solutions?

Is there any good solution? Not really.

Jim Nielsen feels that part of the issue is the lack of representation of web developers in the standardization process. That sounds great but is proven not to work.

Three years ago Fronteers and I attempted to get web developers represented and were met with absolute disinterest. Nobody else cared even one shit, and the initiative sank like a stone.

So a hypothetical web dev representative in W3C is not going to work. Also, the organisational work would involve a lot of unpaid labour, and I, for one, am not willing to do it again. Neither is anyone else. So this is not the solution.

And what about Firefox? Well, what about it? Ten years ago it made a disastrous mistake by ignoring the mobile web for way too long, then it attempted an arrogant and uninformed come-back with Firefox OS that failed, and its history from that point on is one long slide into obscurity. That’s what you get with shitty management.

Pick your poison

So Safari is trying to slow the web down. With Google’s move-fast-break-absofuckinglutely-everything axiom in mind, is Safari’s approach so bad?

Regardless of where you feel the web should be on this spectrum between Google and Apple, there is a fundamental difference between the two.

We have the tools and procedures to manage Safari’s disinterest. They’re essentially the same as the ones we deployed against Microsoft back in the day — though a fundamental difference is that Microsoft was willing to talk while Apple remains its old haughty self, and its “devrels” aren’t actually allowed to do devrelly things such as managing relations with web developers. (Don’t blame them, by the way. If something would ever change they’re going to be our most valuable internal allies — just as the IE team was back in the day.)

On the other hand, we have no process for countering Google’s reverse embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy, since a section of web devs will be enthusiastic about whatever the newest API is. Also, Google devrels talk. And talk. And talk. And provide gigs of data that are hard to make sense of. And refer to their proprietary algorithms that “clearly” show X is in the best interest of the web — and don’t ask questions! And make everything so fucking complicated that we eventually give up and give in.

So pick your poison. Shall we push the web forward until it’s broken, or shall we break it by inaction? What will it be? Privately, my money is on Google. So we should say goodbye to the old web while we still can.

Categories: Front End Web Development, Web Standards

Custom properties and @property

QuirksBlog - Wed, 07/21/2021 - 3:18am

You’re reading a failed article. I hoped to write about @property and how it is useful for extending CSS inheritance considerably in many different circumstances. Alas, I failed. @property turns out to be very useful for font sizes, but does not even approach the general applicability I hoped for.

Grandparent-inheriting

It all started when I commented on what I thought was an interesting but theoretical idea by Lea Verou: what if elements could inherit the font size of not their parent, but their grandparent? Something like this:

div.grandparent { /* font-size could be anything */ } div.parent { font-size: 0.4em; } div.child { font-size: [inherit from grandparent in some sort of way]; font-size: [yes, you could do 2.5em to restore the grandparent's font size]; font-size: [but that's not inheriting, it's just reversing a calculation]; font-size: [and it will not work if the parent's font size is also unknown]; }

Lea told me this wasn’t a vague idea, but something that can be done right now. I was quite surprised — and I assume many of my readers are as well — and asked for more information. So she wrote Inherit ancestor font-size, for fun and profit, where she explained how the new Houdini @property can be used to do this.

This was seriously cool. Also, I picked up a few interesting bits about how CSS custom properties and Houdini @property work. I decided to explain these tricky bits in simple terms — mostly because I know that by writing an explanation I myself will understand them better — and to suggest other possibilities for using Lea’s idea.

Alas, that last objective is where I failed. Lea’s idea can only be used for font sizes. That’s an important use case, but I had hoped for more. The reasons why it doesn’t work elsewhere are instructive, though.

Tokens and values

Let’s consider CSS custom properties. What if we store the grandparent’s font size in a custom property and use that in the child?

div.grandparent { /* font-size could be anything */ --myFontSize: 1em; } div.parent { font-size: 0.4em; } div.child { font-size: var(--myFontSize); /* hey, that's the grandparent's font size, isn't it? */ }

This does not work. The child will have the same font size as the parent, and ignore the grandparent. In order to understand why we need to understand how custom properties work. What does this line of CSS do?

--myFontSize: 1em;

It sets a custom property that we can use later. Well duh.

Sure. But what value does this custom property have?

... errr ... 1em?

Nope. The answer is: none. That’s why the code example doesn’t work.

When they are defined, custom properties do not have a value or a type. All that you ordered the browsers to do is to store a token in the variable --myFontSize.

This took me a while to wrap my head around, so let’s go a bit deeper. What is a token? Let’s briefly switch to JavaScript to explain.

let myVar = 10;

What’s the value of myVar in this line? I do not mean: what value is stored in the variable myVar, but: what value does the character sequence myVar have in that line of code? And what type?

Well, none. Duh. It’s not a variable or value, it’s just a token that the JavaScript engine interprets as “allow me to access and change a specific variable” whenever you type it.

CSS custom properties also hold such tokens. They do not have any intrinsic meaning. Instead, they acquire meaning when they are interpreted by the CSS engine in a certain context, just as the myVar token is in the JavaScript example.

So the CSS custom property contains the token 1em without any value, without any type, without any meaning — as yet.

You can use pretty any bunch of characters in a custom property definition. Browsers make no assumptions about their validity or usefulness because they don’t yet know what you want to do with the token. So this, too, is a perfectly fine CSS custom property:

--myEgoTrip: ppk;

Browsers shrug, create the custom property, and store the indicated token. The fact that ppk is invalid in all CSS contexts is irrelevant: we haven’t tried to use it yet.

It’s when you actually use the custom property that values and types are assigned. So let’s use it:

background-color: var(--myEgoTrip);

Now the CSS parser takes the tokens we defined earlier and replaces the custom property with them:

background-color: ppk;

And only NOW the tokens are read and intrepreted. In this case that results in an error: ppk is not a valid value for background-color. So the CSS declaration as a whole is invalid and nothing happens — well, technically it gets the unset value, but the net result is the same. The custom property itself is still perfectly valid, though.

The same happens in our original code example:

div.grandparent { /* font-size could be anything */ --myFontSize: 1em; /* just a token; no value, no meaning */ } div.parent { font-size: 0.4em; } div.child { font-size: var(--myFontSize); /* becomes */ font-size: 1em; /* hey, this is valid CSS! */ /* Right, you obviously want the font size to be the same as the parent's */ /* Sure thing, here you go */ }

In div.child he tokens are read and interpreted by the CSS parser. This results in a declaration font-size: 1em;. This is perfectly valid CSS, and the browsers duly note that the font size of this element should be 1em.

font-size: 1em is relative. To what? Well, to the parent’s font size, of course. Duh. That’s how CSS font-size works.

So now the font size of the child becomes the same as its parent’s, and browsers will proudly display the child element’s text in the same font size as the parent element’s while ignoring the grandparent.

This is not what we wanted to achieve, though. We want the grandparent’s font size. Custom properties — by themselves — don’t do what we want. We have to find another solution.

@property

Lea’s article explains that other solution. We have to use the Houdini @property rule.

@property --myFontSize { syntax: "<length>"; initial-value: 0; inherits: true; } div { border: 1px solid; padding: 1em; } div.grandparent { /* font-size could be anything */ --myFontSize: 1em; } div.parent { font-size: 0.4em; } div.child { font-size: var(--myFontSize); }

Now it works. Wut? Yep — though only in Chrome so far.

@property --myFontSize { syntax: ""; initial-value: 0; inherits: true; } section.example { max-width: 500px; } section.example div { border: 1px solid; padding: 1em; } div.grandparent { font-size: 23px; --myFontSize: 1em; } div.parent { font-size: 0.4em; } div.child { font-size: var(--myFontSize); } This is the grandparent This is the parent This is the child

What black magic is this?

Adding the @property rule changes the custom property --myFontSize from a bunch of tokens without meaning to an actual value. Moreover, this value is calculated in the context it is defined in — the grandfather — so that the 1em value now means 100% of the font size of the grandfather. When we use it in the child it still has this value, and therefore the child gets the same font size as the grandfather, which is exactly what we want to achieve.

(The variable uses a value from the context it’s defined in, and not the context it’s executed in. If, like me, you have a grounding in basic JavaScript you may hear “closures!” in the back of your mind. While they are not the same, and you shouldn’t take this apparent equivalency too far, this notion still helped me understand. Maybe it’ll help you as well.)

Unfortunately I do not quite understand what I’m doing here, though I can assure you the code snippet works in Chrome — and will likely work in the other browsers once they support @property.

Misson completed — just don’t ask me how.

Syntax

You have to get the definition right. You need all three lines in the @property rule. See also the specification and the MDN page.

@property --myFontSize { syntax: "<length>"; initial-value: 0; inherits: true; }

The syntax property tells browsers what kind of property it is and makes parsing it easier. Here is the list of possible values for syntax, and in 99% of the cases one of these values is what you need.

You could also create your own syntax, e.g. syntax: "ppk | <length>"

Now the ppk keyword and any sort of length is allowed as a value.

Note that percentages are not lengths — one of the many things I found out during the writing of this article. Still, they are so common that a special value for “length that may be a percentage or may be calculated using percentages” was created:

syntax: "<length-percentage>"

Finally, one special case you need to know about is this one:

syntax: "*"

MDN calls this a universal selector, but it isn’t, really. Instead, it means “I don’t know what syntax we’re going to use” and it tells browsers not to attempt to interpret the custom property. In our case that would be counterproductive: we definitely want the 1em to be interpreted. So our example doesn’t work with syntax: "*".

initial-value and inherits

An initial-value property is required for any syntax value that is not a *. Here that’s simple: just give it an initial value of 0 — or 16px, or any absolute value. The value doesn’t really matter since we’re going to overrule it anyway. Still, a relative value such as 1em is not allowed: browsers don’t know what the 1em would be relative to and reject it as an initial value.

Finally, inherits: true specifies that the custom property value can be inherited. We definitely want the computed 1em value to be inherited by the child — that’s the entire point of this experiment. So we carefully set this flag to true.

Other use cases

So far this article merely rehashed parts of Lea’s. Since I’m not in the habit of rehashing other people’s articles my original plan was to add at least one other use case. Alas, I failed, though Lea was kind enough to explain why each of my ideas fails.

Percentage of what?

Could we grandfather-inherit percentual margins and paddings? They are relative to the width of the parent of the element you define them on, and I was wondering if it might be useful to send the grandparent’s margin on to the child just like the font size. Something like this:

@property --myMargin { syntax: "<length-percentage>"; initial-value: 0; inherits: true; } div.grandparent { --myMargin: 25%; margin-left: var(--myMargin); } div.parent { font-size: 0.4em; } div.child { margin-left: var(--myMargin); /* should now be 25% of the width of the grandfather's parent */ /* but isn't */ }

Alas, this does not work. Browsers cannot resolve the 25% in the context of the grandparent, as they did with the 1em, because they don’t know what to do.

The most important trick for using percentages in CSS is to always ask yourself: “percentage of WHAT?”

That’s exactly what browsers do when they encounter this @property definition. 25% of what? The parent’s font size? Or the parent’s width? (This is the correct answer, but browsers have no way of knowing that.) Or maybe the width of the element itself, for use in background-position?

Since browsers cannot figure out what the percentage is relative to they do nothing: the custom property gets the initial value of 0 and the grandfather-inheritance fails.

Colours

Another idea I had was using this trick for the grandfather’s text colour. What if we store currentColor, which always has the value of the element’s text colour, and send it on to the grandchild? Something like this:

@property --myColor { syntax: "<color>"; initial-value: black; inherits: true; } div.grandparent { /* color unknown */ --myColor: currentColor; } div.parent { color: red; } div.child { color: var(--myColor); /* should now have the same color as the grandfather */ /* but doesn't */ }

Alas, this does not work either. When the @property blocks are evaluated, and 1em is calculated, currentColor specifically is not touched because it is used as an initial (default) value for some inherited SVG and CSS properties such as fill. Unfortunately I do not fully understand what’s going on, but Tab says this behaviour is necessary, so it is.

Pity, but such is life. Especially when you’re working with new CSS functionalities.

Conclusion

So I tried to find more possbilities for using Lea’s trick, but failed. Relative units are fairly sparse, especially when you leave percentages out of the equation. em and related units such as rem are the only ones, as far as I can see.

So we’re left with a very useful trick for font sizes. You should use it when you need it (bearing in mind that right now it’s only supported in Chromium-based browsers), but extending it to other declarations is not possible at the moment.

Many thanks to Lea Verou and Tab Atkins for reviewing and correcting an earlier draft of this article.

Categories: Front End Web Development, Web Standards

Let’s talk about money

QuirksBlog - Tue, 06/29/2021 - 1:23am

Let’s talk about money!

Let’s talk about how hard it is to pay small amounts online to people whose work you like and who could really use a bit of income. Let’s talk about how Coil aims to change that.

Taking a subscription to a website is moderately easy, but the person you want to pay must have enabled them. Besides, do you want to purchase a full subscription in order to read one or two articles per month?

Sending a one-time donation is pretty easy as well, but, again, the site owner must have enabled them. And even then it just gives them ad-hoc amounts that they cannot depend on.

Then there’s Patreon and Kickstarter and similar systems, but Patreon is essentially a subscription service while Kickstarter is essentially a one-time donation service, except that both keep part of the money you donate.

And then there’s ads ... Do we want small content creators to remain dependent on ads and thus support the entire ad ecosystem? I, personally, would like to get rid of them.

The problem today is that all non-ad-based systems require you to make conscious decisions to support someone — and even if you’re serious about supporting them you may forget to send in a monthly donation or to renew your subscription. It sort-of works, but the user experience can be improved rather dramatically.

That’s where Coil and the Web Monetization Standard come in.

Web Monetization

The idea behind Coil is that you pay for what you consume easily and automatically. It’s not a subscription - you only pay for what you consume. It’s not a one-time donation, either - you always pay when you consume.

Payments occur automatically when you visit a website that is also subscribed to Coil, and the amount you pay to a single site owner depends on the time you spend on the site. Coil does not retain any of your money, either — everything goes to the people you support.

In this series of four articles we’ll take a closer look at the architecture of the current Coil implementation, how to work with it right now, the proposed standard, and what’s going to happen in the future.

Overview

So how does Coil work right now?

Both the payer and the payee need a Coil account to send and receive money. The payee has to add a <meta> tag with a Coil payment pointer to all pages they want to monetize. The payer has to install the Coil extension in their browsers. You can see this extension as a polyfill. In the future web monetization will, I hope, be supported natively in all browsers.

Once that’s done the process works pretty much automatically. The extension searches for the <meta> tag on any site the user visits. If it finds one it starts a payment stream from payer to payee that continues for as long as the payer stays on the site.

The payee can use the JavaScript API to interact with the monetization stream. For instance, they can show extra content to paying users, or keep track of how much a user paid so far. Unfortunately these functionalities require JavaScript, and the hiding of content is fairly easy to work around. Thus it is not yet suited for serious business purposes, especially in web development circles.

This is one example of how the current system is still a bit rough around the edges. You’ll find more examples in the subsequent articles. Until the time browsers support the standard natively and you can determine your visitors’ monetization status server-side these rough bits will continue to exist. For the moment we will have to work with the system we have.

This article series will discuss all topics we touched on in more detail.

Start now!

For too long we have accepted free content as our birthright, without considering the needs of the people who create it. This becomes even more curious for articles and documentation that are absolutely vital to our work as web developers.

Take a look at this list of currently-monetized web developer sites. Chances are you’ll find a few people whose work you used in the past. Don’t they deserve your direct support?

Free content is not a right, it’s an entitlement. The sooner we internalize this, and start paying independent voices, the better for the web.

The only alternative is that all articles and documentation that we depend on will written by employees of large companies. And employees, no matter how well-meaning, will reflect the priorities and point of view of their employer in the long run.

So start now.

In order to support them you should invest a bit of time once and US$5 per month permanently. I mean, that’s not too much to ask, is it?

Continue

I wrote this article and its sequels for Coil, and yes, I’m getting paid. Still, I believe in what they are doing, so I won’t just spread marketing drivel. Initially it was unclear to me exactly how Coil works. So I did some digging, and the remaining parts of this series give a detailed description of how Coil actually works in practice.

For now the other three articles will only be available on dev.to. I just published part 2, which gives a high-level overview of how Coil works right now. Part 3 will describe the meta tag and the JavaScript API, and in part 4 we’ll take a look at the future, which includes a formal W3C standard. Those parts will be published next week and the week after that.

Categories: Front End Web Development, Web Standards

Wed, 12/31/1969 - 2:00pm

Front End Web Development

Anchoreum: A New Game for Learning Anchor Positioning

Tim Brown: Flexible Typesetting is now yours, for free

The Different (and Modern) Ways to Toggle Content

Steven Heller’s Font of the Month: Roadhouse

Popping Comments With CSS Anchor Positioning and View-Driven Animations

Fluid Everything Else

Web-Slinger.css: Like Wow.js But With CSS-y Scroll Animations

State of CSS 2024 Results

New business wanted

position: sticky, draft 1

Breaking the web forward

Custom properties and @property

Let’s talk about money

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