Web Standards

I was chatting with Andy Clarke the other day about a new article he wants to write about SVG animations.

“I’ve read some things that said that SMIL might be a dead end.” He said. “Whaddya think?”

That was my impression, too. Sarah Drasner summed up the situation nicely way back in 2017:

Unfortunately, support for SMIL is waning in WebKit, and has never (nor will likely ever) exist for Microsoft’s IE or Edge browsers. 

Chrome was also in on the party and published an intent to deprecate SMIL, citing work in other browsers to support SVG animations in CSS. MDN linked to that same thread in its SMIL documentation when it published a deprecation warning.

Well, Chrome never deprecated SMIL. At least according to this reply in the thread dated 2023. And since then, we’ve also seen Microsoft’s Edge adopt a Chromium engine, effectively making it a Chrome clone. Also, last I checked, Caniuse reports full support in WebKit browsers.

This browser support data is from Caniuse, which has more detail. A number indicates that browser supports the feature at that version and up.

DesktopChromeFirefoxIEEdgeSafari5411796Mobile / TabletAndroid ChromeAndroid FirefoxAndroidiOS Safari13413636.0-6.1

Now, I’m not saying that SMIL is perfectly alive and well. It could still very well be in the doldrums, especially when there are robust alternatives in CSS and JavaScript. But it’s also not dead in the water.

SMIL on? originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

I’m a big fan of Astro’s focus on developer experience (DX) and the onboarding of new developers. While the basic DX is strong, I can easily make a convoluted system that is hard to onboard my own developers to. I don’t want that to happen.

If I have multiple developers working on a project, I want them to know exactly what to expect from every component that they have at their disposal. This goes double for myself in the future when I’ve forgotten how to work with my own system!

To do that, a developer could go read each component and get a strong grasp of it before using one, but that feels like the onboarding would be incredibly slow. A better way would be to set up the interface so that as the developer is using the component, they have the right knowledge immediately available. Beyond that, it would bake in some defaults that don’t allow developers to make costly mistakes and alerts them to what those mistakes are before pushing code!

Enter, of course, TypeScript. Astro comes with TypeScript set up out of the box. You don’t have to use it, but since it’s there, let’s talk about how to use it to craft a stronger DX for our development teams.

Watch

I’ve also recorded a video version of this article that you can watch if that’s your jam. Check it out on YouTube for chapters and closed captioning.

Setup

In this demo, we’re going to use a basic Astro project. To get this started, run the following command in your terminal and choose the “Minimal” template.

npm create astro@latest

This will create a project with an index route and a very simple “Welcome” component. For clarity, I recommend removing the <Welcome /> component from the route to have a clean starting point for your project.

To add a bit of design, I’d recommend setting up Tailwind for Astro (though, you’re welcome to style your component however you would like including a style block in the component).

npx astro add tailwind

Once this is complete, you’re ready to write your first component.

Creating the basic Heading component

Let’s start by defining exactly what options we want to provide in our developer experience.

For this component, we want to let developers choose from any HTML heading level (H1-H6). We also want them to be able to choose a specific font size and font weight — it may seem obvious now, but we don’t want people choosing a specific heading level for the weight and font size, so we separate those concerns.

Finally, we want to make sure that any additional HTML attributes can be passed through to our component. There are few things worse than having a component and then not being able to do basic functionality later.

Using Dynamic tags to create the HTML element

Let’s start by creating a simple component that allows the user to dynamically choose the HTML element they want to use. Create a new component at ./src/components/Heading.astro.

--- // ./src/component/Heading.astro const { as } = Astro.props; const As = as; --- <As> <slot /> </As>

To use a prop as a dynamic element name, we need the variable to start with a capital letter. We can define this as part of our naming convention and make the developer always capitalize this prop in their use, but that feels inconsistent with how most naming works within props. Instead, let’s keep our focus on the DX, and take that burden on for ourselves.

In order to dynamically register an HTML element in our component, the variable must start with a capital letter. We can convert that in the frontmatter of our component. We then wrap all the children of our component in the <As> component by using Astro’s built-in <slot /> component.

Now, we can use this component in our index route and render any HTML element we want. Import the component at the top of the file, and then add <h1> and <h2> elements to the route.

--- // ./src/pages/index.astro import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro'; import Heading from '../components/Heading.astro'; --- <Layout> <Heading as="h1">Hello!</Heading> <Heading as="h2">Hello world</Heading> </Layout>

This will render them correctly on the page and is a great start.

Adding more custom props as a developer interface

Let’s clean up the element choosing by bringing it inline to our props destructuring, and then add in additional props for weight, size, and any additional HTML attributes.

To start, let’s bring the custom element selector into the destructuring of the Astro.props object. At the same time, let’s set a sensible default so that if a developer forgets to pass this prop, they still will get a heading.

--- // ./src/component/Heading.astro const { as: As="h2" } = Astro.props; --- <As> <slot /> </As>

Next, we’ll get weight and size. Here’s our next design choice for our component system: do we make our developers know the class names they need to use or do we provide a generic set of sizes and do the mapping ourselves? Since we’re building a system, I think it’s important to move away from class names and into a more declarative setup. This will also future-proof our system by allowing us to change out the underlying styling and class system without affecting the DX.

Not only do we future proof it, but we also are able to get around a limitation of Tailwind by doing this. Tailwind, as it turns out can’t handle dynamically-created class strings, so by mapping them, we solve an immediate issue as well.

In this case, our sizes will go from small (sm) to six times the size (6xl) and our weights will go from “light” to “bold”.

Let’s start by adjusting our frontmatter. We need to get these props off the Astro.props object and create a couple objects that we can use to map our interface to the proper class structure.

--- // ./src/component/Heading.astro const weights = { "bold": "font-bold", "semibold": "font-semibold", "medium": "font-medium", "light": "font-light" } const sizes= { "6xl": "text-6xl", "5xl": "text-5xl", "4xl": "text-4xl", "3xl": "text-3xl", "2xl": "text-2xl", "xl": "text-xl", "lg": "text-lg", "md": "text-md", "sm": "text-sm" } const { as: As="h2", weight="medium", size="2xl" } = Astro.props; ---

Depending on your use case, this amount of sizes and weights might be overkill. The great thing about crafting your own component system is that you get to choose and the only limitations are the ones you set for yourself.

From here, we can then set the classes on our component. While we could add them in a standard class attribute, I find using Astro’s built-in class:list directive to be the cleaner way to programmatically set classes in a component like this. The directive takes an array of classes that can be strings, arrays themselves, objects, or variables. In this case, we’ll select the correct size and weight from our map objects in the frontmatter.

--- // ./src/component/Heading.astro const weights = { bold: "font-bold", semibold: "font-semibold", medium: "font-medium", light: "font-light", }; const sizes = { "6xl": "text-6xl", "5xl": "text-5xl", "4xl": "text-4xl", "3xl": "text-3xl", "2xl": "text-2xl", xl: "text-xl", lg: "text-lg", md: "text-md", sm: "text-sm", }; const { as: As = "h2", weight = "medium", size = "2xl" } = Astro.props; --- <As class:list={[ sizes[size], weights[weight] ]} > <slot /> </As>

Your front-end should automatically shift a little in this update. Now your font weight will be slightly thicker and the classes should be applied in your developer tools.

From here, add the props to your index route, and find the right configuration for your app.

--- // ./src/pages/index.astro import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro'; import Heading from '../components/Heading.astro'; --- <Layout> <Heading as="h1" size="6xl" weight="light">Hello!</Heading> <Heading as="h3" size="xl" weight="bold">Hello world</Heading> </Layout>

Our custom props are finished, but currently, we can’t use any default HTML attributes, so let’s fix that.

Adding HTML attributes to the component

We don’t know what sorts of attributes our developers will want to add, so let’s make sure they can add any additional ones they need.

To do that, we can spread any other prop being passed to our component, and then add them to the rendered component.

--- // ./src/component/Heading.astro const weights = { // etc. }; const sizes = { // etc. }; const { as: As = "h2", weight = "medium", size = "md", ...attrs } = Astro.props; --- <As class:list={[ sizes[size], weights[weight] ]} {...attrs} > <slot /> </As>

From here, we can add any arbitrary attributes to our element.

--- // ./src/pages/index.astro import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro'; import Heading from '../components/Heading.astro'; --- <Layout> <Heading id="my-id" as="h1" size="6xl" weight="light">Hello!</Heading> <Heading class="text-blue-500" as="h3" size="xl" weight="bold">Hello world</Heading> </Layout>

I’d like to take a moment to truly appreciate one aspect of this code. Our <h1>, we add an id attribute. No big deal. Our <h3>, though, we’re adding an additional class. My original assumption when creating this was that this would conflict with the class:list set in our component. Astro takes that worry away. When the class is passed and added to the component, Astro knows to merge the class prop with the class:list directive and automatically makes it work. One less line of code!

In many ways, I like to consider these additional attributes as “escape hatches” in our component library. Sure, we want our developers to use our tools exactly as intended, but sometimes, it’s important to add new attributes or push our design system’s boundaries. For this, we allow them to add their own attributes, and it can create a powerful mix.

It looks done, but are we?

At this point, if you’re following along, it might feel like we’re done, but we have two issues with our code right now: (1) our component has “red squiggles” in our code editor and (2) our developers can make a BIG mistake if they choose.

The red squiggles come from type errors in our component. Astro gives us TypeScript and linting by default, and sizes and weights can’t be of type: any. Not a big deal, but concerning depending on your deployment settings.

The other issue is that our developers don’t have to choose a heading element for their heading. I’m all for escape hatches, but only if they don’t break the accessibility and SEO of my site.

Imagine, if a developer used this with a div instead of an h1 on the page. What would happen?We don’t have to imagine, make the change and see.

It looks identical, but now there’s no <h1> element on the page. Our semantic structure is broken, and that’s bad news for many reasons. Let’s use typing to help our developers make the best decisions and know what options are available for each prop.

Adding types to the component

To set up our types, first we want to make sure we handle any HTML attributes that come through. Astro, again, has our backs and has the typing we need to make this work. We can import the right HTML attribute types from Astro’s typing package. Import the type and then we can extend that type for our own props. In our example, we’ll select the h1 types, since that should cover most anything we need for our headings.

Inside the Props interface, we’ll also add our first custom type. We’ll specify that the as prop must be one of a set of strings, instead of just a basic string type. In this case, we want it to be h1–h6 and nothing else.

--- // ./src/component/Heading.astro import type { HTMLAttributes } from 'astro/types'; interface Props extends HTMLAttributes<'h1'> { as: "h1" | "h2" | "h3" | "h4" | "h5" | "h6"; } //... The rest of the file ---

After adding this, you’ll note that in your index route, the <h1> component should now have a red underline for the as="div" property. When you hover over it, it will let you know that the as type does not allow for div and it will show you a list of acceptable strings.

If you delete the div, you should also now have the ability to see a list of what’s available as you try to add the string.

While it’s not a big deal for the element selection, knowing what’s available is a much bigger deal to the rest of the props, since those are much more custom.

Let’s extend the custom typing to show all the available options. We also denote these items as optional by using the ?:before defining the type.

While we could define each of these with the same type functionality as our as type, that doesn’t keep this future proofed. If we add a new size or weight, we’d have to make sure to update our type. To solve this, we can use a fun trick in TypeScript: keyof typeof.

There are two helper functions in TypeScript that will help us convert our weights and sizes object maps into string literal types:

• typeof: This helper takes an object and converts it to a type. For instance typeof weights would return type { bold: string, semibold: string, ...etc}
• keyof: This helper function takes a type and returns a list of string literals from that type’s keys. For instance keyof type { bold: string, semibold: string, ...etc} would return "bold" | "semibold" | ...etc which is exactly what we want for both weights and sizes.

--- // ./src/component/Heading.astro import type { HTMLAttributes } from 'astro/types'; interface Props extends HTMLAttributes<'h1'> { as: "h1" | "h2" | "h3" | "h4" | "h5" | "h6"; weight?: keyof typeof weights; size?: keyof typeof sizes; } // ... The rest of the file

Now, when we want to add a size or weight, we get a dropdown list in our code editor showing exactly what’s available on the type. If something is selected, outside the list, it will show an error in the code editor helping the developer know what they missed.

While none of this is necessary in the creation of Astro components, the fact that it’s built in and there’s no additional tooling to set up means that using it is very easy to opt into.

I’m by no means a TypeScript expert, but getting this set up for each component takes only a few additional minutes and can save a lot of time for developers down the line (not to mention, it makes onboarding developers to your system much easier).

Crafting Strong DX With Astro Components and TypeScript originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

A friend DMs Lee Meyer a CodePen by Manuel Schaller containing a pure CSS simulation of one of the world’s earliest arcade games, Pong, with both paddles participating automatically, in an endless loop. The demo reminds Lee of an arcade machine in attract mode awaiting a coin, and the iconic imagery awakens muscle memory from his misspent childhood, causing him to search his pocket in which he finds the token a spooky shopkeeper gave him last year at the CSS tricks stall in the haunted carnival. The token gleams like a power-up in the light of his laptop, which has a slot he never noticed. He feeds the token into the slot, and the CodePen reloads itself. A vertical range input and a life counter appear, allowing him to control the left paddle and play the game in Chrome using a cocktail of modern and experimental CSS features to implement collision detection in CSS animations. He recalls the spooky shopkeeper’s warning that playing with these features has driven some developers to madness, but the shopkeeper’s voice in Lee’s head whispers: “Too late, we are already playing.”

CSS collision detection: Past and present

So, maybe the experience of using modern CSS to add collision detection and interactivity to an animation wasn’t as much like a screenplay sponsored by CSS as I depicted in the intro above — but it did feel like magic compared to what Alex Walker had to go through in 2013 to achieve a similar effect. Hilariously, he describes his implementation as “a glittering city of hacks built on the banks of the ol’ Hack River. On the Planet Hack.“ Alex’s version of CSS Pong cleverly combines checkbox hacks, sibling selectors, and :hover, whereas the CodePen below uses style queries to detect collisions. I feel it’s a nice illustration of how far CSS has come, and a testament to increased power and expressiveness of CSS more than a decade later. It shows how much power we get when combining new CSS features — in this case, that includes style queries, animatable custom properties, and animation timelines. The future CSS features of inline conditionals and custom functions might be able to simplify this code more.

CodePen Embed Fallback Collision detection with style queries

Interactive CSS animations with elements ricocheting off each other seems more plausible in 2025 and the code is somewhat sensible. While it’s unnecessary to implement Pong in CSS, and the CSS Working Group probably hasn’t been contemplating how to make that particular niche task easier, the increasing flexibility and power of CSS reinforce my suspicion that one day it will be a lifestyle choice whether to achieve any given effect with scripting or CSS.

The demo is a similar number of lines of CSS to Alex’s 2013 implementation, but it didn’t feel much like a hack. It’s a demo of modern CSS features working together in the way I expected after reading the instruction booklet. Sometimes when reading introductory articles about the new features we are getting in CSS, it’s hard to appreciate how game-changing they are till you see several features working together. As often happens when pushing the boundaries of a technology, we are going to bump up against the current limitations of style queries and animations. But it’s all in good fun, and we’ll learn about these CSS features in more detail than if we had not attempted this crazy experiment.

It does seem to work, and my 12-year-old and 7-year-old have both playtested it on my phone and laptop, so it gets the “works on Lee’s devices” seal of quality. Also, since Chrome now supports controlling animations using range inputs, we can make our game playable on mobile, unlike the 2013 version, which relied on :hover. Temani Afif provides a great explanation of how and why view progress timelines can be used to style anything based on the value of a range input.

Using style queries to detect if the paddle hit the ball

The ball follows a fixed path, and whether the player’s paddle intersects with the ball when it reaches our side is the only input we have into whether it continues its predetermined bouncy loop or the screen flashes red as the life counter goes down till we see the “Game Over” screen with the option to play again.

This type of interactivity is what game designers call a quick time event. It’s still a game for sure, but five months ago, when I was young and naive, I mused in my article on animation timelines that the animation timeline feature could open the door for advanced games and interactive experiences in CSS. I wrote that a video game is just a “hyper-interactive animation.” Indeed, the above experiment shows that the new features in CSS allow us to respond to user input in sophisticated ways, but the demo also clarifies the difference between the kind of interactivity we can expect from the current incarnation of CSS versus scripting. The above experiment is more like if Pong were a game inside the old-school arcade game Dragon’s Lair, which was one giant quick time event. It only works because there are limited possible outcomes, but they are certainly less limited than what we used to be able to achieve in CSS.

Since we know collision detection with the paddle is the only opportunity for the user to have a say in what happens next, let’s focus on that implementation. It will require more mental gymnastics than I would like, since container style queries only allow for name-value pairs with the same syntax as feature queries, meaning we can’t use “greater than” or “less than” operators when comparing numeric values like we do with container size queries which follow the same syntax as @media size queries.

The workaround below allows us to create style queries based on the ball position being in or out of the range of the paddle. If the ball hits our side, then by default, the play field will flash red and temporarily unpause the animation that decrements the life counter (more on that later). But if the ball hits our side and is within range of the paddle, we leave the life-decrementing animation paused, and make the field background green while the ball hits the paddle. Since we don’t have “greater than” or “less than” operators in style queries, we (ab)use the min() function. If the result equals the first argument then that argument is less than or equal to the second; otherwise it’s greater than the second argument. It’s logical but made me wish for better comparison operators in style queries. Nevertheless, I was impressed that style queries allow the collision detection to be fairly readable, if a little more verbose than I would like.

body { --int-ball-position-x: round(down, var(--ball-position-x)); --min-ball-position-y-and-top-of-paddle: min(var(--ball-position-y) + var(--ball-height), var(--ping-position)); --min-ball-position-y-and-bottom-of-paddle: min(var(--ball-position-y), var(--ping-position) + var(--paddle-height)); } @container style(--int-ball-position-x: var(--ball-left-boundary)) { .screen { --lives-decrement: running; .field { background: red; } } } @container style(--min-ball-position-y-and-top-of-paddle: var(--ping-position)) and style(--min-ball-position-y-and-bottom-of-paddle: var(--ball-position-y)) and style(--int-ball-position-x: var(--ball-left-boundary)) { .screen { --lives-decrement: paused; .field { background: green; } } } Responding to collisions

Now that we can style our playing field based on whether the paddle hits the ball, we want to decrement the life counter if our paddle misses the ball, and display “Game Over” when we run out of lives. One way to achieve side effects in CSS is by pausing and unpausing keyframe animations that run forwards. These days, we can style things based on custom properties, which we can set in animations. Using this fact, we can take the power of paused animations to another level.

body { animation: ball 8s infinite linear, lives 80ms forwards steps(4) var(--lives-decrement); --lives-decrement: paused; } .lives::after { content: var(--lives); } @keyframes lives { 0% { --lives: "3"; } 25% { --lives: "2"; } 75% { --lives: "1"; } 100% { --lives: "0"; } } @container style(--int-ball-position-x: var(--ball-left-boundary)) { .screen { --lives-decrement: running; .field { background: red; } } } @container style(--min-ball-position-y-and-top-of-paddle: var(--ping-position)) and style(--min-ball-position-y-and-bottom-of-paddle: var(--ball-position-y)) and style(--int-ball-position-x: 8) { .screen { --lives-decrement: paused; .field { background: green; } } } @container style(--lives: '0') { .field { display: none; } .game-over { display: flex; } }

So when the ball hits the wall and isn’t in range of the paddle, the lives-decrementing animation is unpaused long enough to let it complete one step. Once it reaches zero we hide the play field and display the “Game Over” screen. What’s fascinating about this part of the experiment is that it shows that, using style queries, all properties become indirectly possible to control via animations, even when working with non-animatable properties. And this applies to properties that control whether other animations play. This article touches on why play state deliberately isn’t animatable and could be dangerous to animate, but we know what we are doing, right?

Full disclosure: The play state approach did lead to hidden complexity in the choice of duration of the animations. I knew that if I chose too long a duration for the life-decrementing counter, it might not have time to proceed to the next step while the ball was hitting the wall, but if I chose too short a duration, missing the ball once might cause the player to lose more than one life.

I made educated guesses of suitable durations for the ball bouncing and life decrementing, and I expected that when working with fixed-duration predictable animations, the life counter would either always work or always fail. I didn’t expect that my first attempt at the implementation intermittently failed to decrement the life counter at the same point in the animation loop. Setting the durations of both these related animations to multiples of eight seems to fix the problem, but why would predetermined animations exhibit unpredictable behavior?

Forefeit the game before somebody else takes you out of the frame

I have theories as to why the unpredictability of the collision detection seemed to be fixed by setting the ball animation to eight seconds and the lives animation to 80 milliseconds. Again, pushing CSS to its limits forces us to think deeper about how it’s working.

1. CSS appears to suffer from timer drift, meaning if you set a keyframes animation to last for one second, it will sometimes take slightly under or over one second. When there is a different rate of change between the ball-bouncing and life-losing, it would make sense that the potential discrepancy between the two would be pronounced and lead to unpredictable collision detection. When the rate of change in both animations is the same, they would suffer about equally from timer drift, meaning the frames still synchronize predictably. Or at least I’m hoping the chance they don’t becomes negligible.
2. Alex’s 2013 version of Pong uses translate3d() to move the ball even though it only moves in 2D. Alex recommends this whenever possible “for efficient animation rendering, offloading processing to the GPU for smoother visual effects.” Doing this may have been an alternative fix if it leads to more precise animation timing. There are tradeoffs so I wasn’t willing to go down that rabbit hole of trying to tune the animation performance in this article — but it could be an interesting focus for future research into CSS collision detection.
3. Maybe style queries take a varying amount of time to kick in, leading to some form of a race condition. It is possible that making the ball-bouncing animation slower made this problem less likely.
4. Maybe the bug remains lurking in the shadows somewhere. What did I expect from a hack I achieved using a magic token from a spooky shopkeeper? Haven’t I seen any eighties movie ever?

Outro

You finish reading the article, and feel sure that the author’s rationale for his supposed fix for the bug is hogwash. Clearly, Lee has been driven insane by the allure of overpowering new CSS features, whereas you respect the power of CSS, but you also respect its limitations. You sit down to spend a few minutes with the collision detection CodePen to prove it is still broken, but then find other flaws in the collision detection, and you commence work on a fork that will be superior. Hey, speaking of timer drift, how is it suddenly 1 a.m.? Only a crazy person would stay up that late playing with CSS when they have to work the next day. “Madness,” repeats the spooky shopkeeper inside your head, and his laughter echoes somewhere in the night.

Roll the credits

This looping Pong CSS animation by Manuel Schaller gave me an amazing basis for adding the collision detection. His twitching paddle animations help give the illusion of playing against a computer opponent, so forking his CodePen let me focus on implementing the collision detection rather than reinventing Pong.

This author is grateful to the junior testing team, comprised of his seven-year-old and twelve-year-old, who declared the CSS Pong implementation “pretty cool.” They also suggested the green and red flashes to signal collisions and misses.

The intro and outro for this article were sponsored by the spooky shopkeeper who sells dangerous CSS tricks. He also sells frozen yoghurt, which he calls froghurt.

Worlds Collide: Keyframe Collision Detection Using Style Queries originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Time flies (insanely) fast during the AI tsunami all of us in the technology industry are facing. So it was surprising to learn my personal AI assistant, Ask LukeW, launched two years ago. Since then I've kept iterating on it when time allowed and two years later...

Ask LukeW is a feature I created for my website to answer people's questions about digital product design, startups, technology, and related topics. It's designed to provide personalized responses using my body of work in a scalable manner.

Since launching two years ago, people have asked (and the system has answered) over 27,000 questions. That averages out to more than 36 a day, which is definitely more than I'd be able to answer using my physical embodiment. So I've certainly gotten scale from the digital version of me.

Ask LukeW works by using AI to generate answers based on the thousands of text articles, hundreds of presentations, videos, and other content I've produced over the years. When you ask a question, AI models identify relevant concepts within my content and use them to create new answers. If the information comes from a specific article, audio file, or video, the source is cited, allowing you to explore the original material if you want to learn more.

In other words, instead of having to search through thousands of files on my website, you can simply ask questions in natural language and get tailored responses. Behind that simplicity is a lot of work on both the technology and design side. To unpack it all, I've written a series of articles on what that looks like and why. If you want to go deep into designing AI-powered experiences... have at it:

• New Ways into Web Content: rethinking how to design software with AI
• Integrated Audio Experiences & Memory: enabling specific content experiences
• Expanding Conversational User Interfaces: extending chat user interfaces
• Integrated Video Experiences: adding video experiences to conversational UI
• Integrated PDF Experiences: unique considerations when adding PDF experiences
• Dynamic Preview Cards: improving how generated answers are shared
• Text Generation Differences: testing the impact of AI new models
• PDF Parsing with Vision Models: using AI vision models to extract PDF contents
• Streaming Citations: citing relevant articles, videos, PDFs, etc. in real-time
• Streaming Inline Images: indexing & displaying relevant images in answers
• Custom Re-ranker: improving content retrieval to answer more questions
• Usability Study: testing a conversational AI interface with designers

Comparing visual artifacts can be a powerful, if fickle, approach to automated testing. Playwright makes this seem simple for websites, but the details might take a little finessing.

Recent downtime prompted me to scratch an itch that had been plaguing me for a while: The style sheet of a website I maintain has grown just a little unwieldy as we’ve been adding code while exploring new features. Now that we have a better idea of the requirements, it’s time for internal CSS refactoring to pay down some of our technical debt, taking advantage of modern CSS features (like using CSS nesting for more obvious structure). More importantly, a cleaner foundation should make it easier to introduce that dark mode feature we’re sorely lacking so we can finally respect users’ preferred color scheme.

However, being of the apprehensive persuasion, I was reluctant to make large changes for fear of unwittingly introducing bugs. I needed something to guard against visual regressions while refactoring — except that means snapshot testing, which is notoriously slow and brittle.

In this context, snapshot testing means taking screenshots to establish a reliable baseline against which we can compare future results. As we’ll see, those artifacts are influenced by a multitude of factors that might not always be fully controllable (e.g. timing, variable hardware resources, or randomized content). We also have to maintain state between test runs, i.e. save those screenshots, which complicates the setup and means our test code alone doesn’t fully describe expectations.

Having procrastinated without a more agreeable solution revealing itself, I finally set out to create what I assumed would be a quick spike. After all, this wouldn’t be part of the regular test suite; just a one-off utility for this particular refactoring task.

Fortunately, I had vague recollections of past research and quickly rediscovered Playwright’s built-in visual comparison feature. Because I try to select dependencies carefully, I was glad to see that Playwright seems not to rely on many external packages.

Setup

The recommended setup with npm init playwright@latest does a decent job, but my minimalist taste had me set everything up from scratch instead. This do-it-yourself approach also helped me understand how the different pieces fit together.

Given that I expect snapshot testing to only be used on rare occasions, I wanted to isolate everything in a dedicated subdirectory, called test/visual; that will be our working directory from here on out. We’ll start with package.json to declare our dependencies, adding a few helper scripts (spoiler!) while we’re at it:

{ "scripts": { "test": "playwright test", "report": "playwright show-report", "update": "playwright test --update-snapshots", "reset": "rm -r ./playwright-report ./test-results ./viz.test.js-snapshots || true" }, "devDependencies": { "@playwright/test": "^1.49.1" } }

If you don’t want node_modules hidden in some subdirectory but also don’t want to burden the root project with this rarely-used dependency, you might resort to manually invoking npm install --no-save @playwright/test in the root directory when needed.

With that in place, npm install downloads Playwright. Afterwards, npx playwright install downloads a range of headless browsers. (We’ll use npm here, but you might prefer a different package manager and task runner.)

We define our test environment via playwright.config.js with about a dozen basic Playwright settings:

import { defineConfig, devices } from "@playwright/test"; let BROWSERS = ["Desktop Firefox", "Desktop Chrome", "Desktop Safari"]; let BASE_URL = "http://localhost:8000"; let SERVER = "cd ../../dist && python3 -m http.server"; let IS_CI = !!process.env.CI; export default defineConfig({ testDir: "./", fullyParallel: true, forbidOnly: IS_CI, retries: 2, workers: IS_CI ? 1 : undefined, reporter: "html", webServer: { command: SERVER, url: BASE_URL, reuseExistingServer: !IS_CI }, use: { baseURL: BASE_URL, trace: "on-first-retry" }, projects: BROWSERS.map(ua => ({ name: ua.toLowerCase().replaceAll(" ", "-"), use: { ...devices[ua] } })) });

Here we expect our static website to already reside within the root directory’s dist folder and to be served at localhost:8000 (see SERVER; I prefer Python there because it’s widely available). I’ve included multiple browsers for illustration purposes. Still, we might reduce that number to speed things up (thus our simple BROWSERS list, which we then map to Playwright’s more elaborate projects data structure). Similarly, continuous integration is YAGNI for my particular scenario, so that whole IS_CI dance could be discarded.

Capture and compare

Let’s turn to the actual tests, starting with a minimal sample.test.js file:

import { test, expect } from "@playwright/test"; test("home page", async ({ page }) => { await page.goto("/"); await expect(page).toHaveScreenshot(); });

npm test executes this little test suite (based on file-name conventions). The initial run always fails because it first needs to create baseline snapshots against which subsequent runs compare their results. Invoking npm test once more should report a passing test.

Changing our site, e.g. by recklessly messing with build artifacts in dist, should make the test fail again. Such failures will offer various options to compare expected and actual visuals:

We can also inspect those baseline snapshots directly: Playwright creates a folder for screenshots named after the test file (sample.test.js-snapshots in this case), with file names derived from the respective test’s title (e.g. home-page-desktop-firefox.png).

Generating tests

Getting back to our original motivation, what we want is a test for every page. Instead of arduously writing and maintaining repetitive tests, we’ll create a simple web crawler for our website and have tests generated automatically; one for each URL we’ve identified.

Playwright’s global setup enables us to perform preparatory work before test discovery begins: Determine those URLs and write them to a file. Afterward, we can dynamically generate our tests at runtime.

While there are other ways to pass data between the setup and test-discovery phases, having a file on disk makes it easy to modify the list of URLs before test runs (e.g. temporarily ignoring irrelevant pages).

Site map

The first step is to extend playwright.config.js by inserting globalSetup and exporting two of our configuration values:

export let BROWSERS = ["Desktop Firefox", "Desktop Chrome", "Desktop Safari"]; export let BASE_URL = "http://localhost:8000"; // etc. export default defineConfig({ // etc. globalSetup: require.resolve("./setup.js") });

Although we’re using ES modules here, we can still rely on CommonJS-specific APIs like require.resolve and __dirname. It appears there’s some Babel transpilation happening in the background, so what’s actually being executed is probably CommonJS? Such nuances sometimes confuse me because it isn’t always obvious what’s being executed where.

We can now reuse those exported values within a newly created setup.js, which spins up a headless browser to crawl our site (just because that’s easier here than using a separate HTML parser):

import { BASE_URL, BROWSERS } from "./playwright.config.js"; import { createSiteMap, readSiteMap } from "./sitemap.js"; import playwright from "@playwright/test"; export default async function globalSetup(config) { // only create site map if it doesn't already exist try { readSiteMap(); return; } catch(err) {} // launch browser and initiate crawler let browser = playwright.devices[BROWSERS[0]].defaultBrowserType; browser = await playwright[browser].launch(); let page = await browser.newPage(); await createSiteMap(BASE_URL, page); await browser.close(); }

This is fairly boring glue code; the actual crawling is happening within sitemap.js:

• createSiteMap determines URLs and writes them to disk.
• readSiteMap merely reads any previously created site map from disk. This will be our foundation for dynamically generating tests. (We’ll see later why this needs to be synchronous.)

Fortunately, the website in question provides a comprehensive index of all pages, so my crawler only needs to collect unique local URLs from that index page:

function extractLocalLinks(baseURL) { let urls = new Set(); let offset = baseURL.length; for(let { href } of document.links) { if(href.startsWith(baseURL)) { let path = href.slice(offset); urls.add(path); } } return Array.from(urls); }

Wrapping that in a more boring glue code gives us our sitemap.js:

import { readFileSync, writeFileSync } from "node:fs"; import { join } from "node:path"; let ENTRY_POINT = "/topics"; let SITEMAP = join(__dirname, "./sitemap.json"); export async function createSiteMap(baseURL, page) { await page.goto(baseURL + ENTRY_POINT); let urls = await page.evaluate(extractLocalLinks, baseURL); let data = JSON.stringify(urls, null, 4); writeFileSync(SITEMAP, data, { encoding: "utf-8" }); } export function readSiteMap() { try { var data = readFileSync(SITEMAP, { encoding: "utf-8" }); } catch(err) { if(err.code === "ENOENT") { throw new Error("missing site map"); } throw err; } return JSON.parse(data); } function extractLocalLinks(baseURL) { // etc. }

The interesting bit here is that extractLocalLinks is evaluated within the browser context — thus we can rely on DOM APIs, notably document.links — while the rest is executed within the Playwright environment (i.e. Node).

Tests

Now that we have our list of URLs, we basically just need a test file with a simple loop to dynamically generate corresponding tests:

for(let url of readSiteMap()) { test(`page at ${url}`, async ({ page }) => { await page.goto(url); await expect(page).toHaveScreenshot(); }); }

This is why readSiteMap had to be synchronous above: Playwright doesn’t currently support top-level await within test files.

In practice, we’ll want better error reporting for when the site map doesn’t exist yet. Let’s call our actual test file viz.test.js:

import { readSiteMap } from "./sitemap.js"; import { test, expect } from "@playwright/test"; let sitemap = []; try { sitemap = readSiteMap(); } catch(err) { test("site map", ({ page }) => { throw new Error("missing site map"); }); } for(let url of sitemap) { test(`page at ${url}`, async ({ page }) => { await page.goto(url); await expect(page).toHaveScreenshot(); }); }

Getting here was a bit of a journey, but we’re pretty much done… unless we have to deal with reality, which typically takes a bit more tweaking.

Exceptions

Because visual testing is inherently flaky, we sometimes need to compensate via special casing. Playwright lets us inject custom CSS, which is often the easiest and most effective approach. Tweaking viz.test.js…

// etc. import { join } from "node:path"; let OPTIONS = { stylePath: join(__dirname, "./viz.tweaks.css") }; // etc. await expect(page).toHaveScreenshot(OPTIONS); // etc.

… allows us to define exceptions in viz.tweaks.css:

/* suppress state */ main a:visited { color: var(--color-link); } /* suppress randomness */ iframe[src$="/articles/signals-reactivity/demo.html"] { visibility: hidden; } /* suppress flakiness */ body:has(h1 a[href="/wip/unicode-symbols/"]) { main tbody > tr:last-child > td:first-child { font-size: 0; visibility: hidden; } }

:has() strikes again!

Page vs. viewport

At this point, everything seemed hunky-dory to me, until I realized that my tests didn’t actually fail after I had changed some styling. That’s not good! What I hadn’t taken into account is that .toHaveScreenshot only captures the viewport rather than the entire page. We can rectify that by further extending playwright.config.js.

export let WIDTH = 800; export let HEIGHT = WIDTH; // etc. projects: BROWSERS.map(ua => ({ name: ua.toLowerCase().replaceAll(" ", "-"), use: { ...devices[ua], viewport: { width: WIDTH, height: HEIGHT } } }))

…and then by adjusting viz.test.js‘s test-generating loop:

import { WIDTH, HEIGHT } from "./playwright.config.js"; // etc. for(let url of sitemap) { test(`page at ${url}`, async ({ page }) => { checkSnapshot(url, page); }); } async function checkSnapshot(url, page) { // determine page height with default viewport await page.setViewportSize({ width: WIDTH, height: HEIGHT }); await page.goto(url); await page.waitForLoadState("networkidle"); let height = await page.evaluate(getFullHeight); // resize viewport for before snapshotting await page.setViewportSize({ width: WIDTH, height: Math.ceil(height) }); await page.waitForLoadState("networkidle"); await expect(page).toHaveScreenshot(OPTIONS); } function getFullHeight() { return document.documentElement.getBoundingClientRect().height; }

Note that we’ve also introduced a waiting condition, holding until there’s no network traffic for a while in a crude attempt to account for stuff like lazy-loading images.

Be aware that capturing the entire page is more resource-intensive and doesn’t always work reliably: You might have to deal with layout shifts or run into timeouts for long or asset-heavy pages. In other words: This risks exacerbating flakiness.

Conclusion

So much for that quick spike. While it took more effort than expected (I believe that’s called “software development”), this might actually solve my original problem now (not a common feature of software these days). Of course, shaving this yak still leaves me itchy, as I have yet to do the actual work of scratching CSS without breaking anything. Then comes the real challenge: Retrofitting dark mode to an existing website. I just might need more downtime.

Automated Visual Regression Testing With Playwright originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

In his AI Speaker Series presentation at Sutter Hill Ventures, Evan Bacon presented his work on ExpoRouter and DirectFlight, tools designed to address the challenges in mobile app development and distribution. Here's my notes from his talk:

• 90% of time spent on mobile devices occurring inside native apps, particularly in regions outside America where mobile-first adoption is highest
• Despite this, desktop and web platforms remain favored for high-performance tasks, though AI is rapidly enabling more productive mobile experiences for complex tasks like video editing and data analysis
• While people are increasingly on mobile, getting native software int he app stores on these devices is still difficult for developers

ExpoRouter & Server Components

• ExpoRouter is the first file-based framework that enables building both native apps and websites from a single codebase
• By creating files in the app directory, developers automatically generate navigation systems that work across native and web environments
• This leverages familiar web APIs like Link and Ahrefs for navigation, making the system intuitive for web developers
• This combination of web-like development with native rendering has driven widespread adoption, with approximately one-third of content-driven apps in the iOS App Store (across shopping, business, sports, and food/drink categories) now using React Native and Expo
• ExpoRouter's file-based architecture means every screen in an app automatically becomes linkable on both web and native platforms.
• The system extends to advanced features like app clips, where URLs to websites can instantly open native content, downloading just what's needed on demand.
• React Server Components represent the next evolution in this approach, enabling ExpoRouter apps to use the same data fetching and rendering strategies employed by best-in-class native applications
• These components are serialized to a standardized React format that functions like HTML for any environment, creating a consistent system across platforms
• The architecture supports streaming content delivery, allowing apps to start rendering on the client while the server continues creating elements and fetching data so apps look and feel identical to native apps

Deploying to App Stores

• Even with improved development tools, getting apps to users remains complex, requiring Xcode (Mac-only), code signing, encryption status declarations, and a $100 developer fee
• Expo addresses part of this challenge by enabling website deployment worldwide with a single command (EAS deploy), bringing modern web deployment practices to cross-platform development
• But App Store distribution still requires Apple's multi-layered review processes
• To address these distribution challenges, Bacon created DirectFlight, a tool that automates the process of adding testers to TestFlight
• DirectFlight creates self-service links that allow users to add themselves to a development team and download apps without developer intervention for each user
• This eliminates the need for developers to manually navigate Apple's slow interface, fill out redundant information, and manage the invitation process<.li>
• DirectFlight works within Apple's rules by automating the official steps rather than circumventing them, making it a sustainable solution
• There's lots of AI-powered tools for making native apps from text prompts. But these tools need streamlined distribution, which DirectFlight could help with.
• As these tools mature, they promise to allow more developers to reach users directly with native experiences rather than being limited to web platforms

Across tech companies large and small there's often confusion around the difference between a vision, mission, and strategy. On the surface might feel like semantics but I've found thinking about the distinctions to be very helpful for aligning teams.

Basically I've pulled out these definitions enough times that it seemed like time to write them all out:

• Vision is what the world looks like if you succeed. It paints a picture of the future state you're trying to achieve. It's an end state.
• Mission is why your organization exists. It's the fundamental purpose that should guide all decisions and actions.
• Strategy is how you can get there. It outlines the high-level approach you'll take to realize your vision and fulfill your mission.

So why is this confusing? For starters, having a purpose doesn't provide clarity on what the end state looks like. So a mission isn't really a substitute for a vision. To get to that end state you need a plan, that's what strategy is for. It's high level but not as much as mission and vision.

It might also help to go one step deeper and think about concrete objectives. The specific, measurable goals that support your strategy. They break down the bigger plan into actionable steps. This is where people get into acronyms like VMSO (Vision, Mission, Strategy, Objectives). Three concepts already enough, so let's not get too corporate-y here. (I'm probably already walking the line too much with this article.)

Instead I'll reference the poster Startup Vitamins made from one of my quotes: "Dream in Years, Plan in Months, Ship in Days." In the days of AI, it can feel like planning in months is too long but the higher level concept still holds up. Your dreams are the vision. Your plan is the strategy. Your set objectives and ship regularly to keep things moving toward the vision. Why do all this? cause of your mission. It's why you're there after all.

There’s a bit of a blind spot when working with CSS logical properties concerning shorthands. Miriam explains:

Logical properties are a great way to optimize our sites in advance, without any real effort.

But what if we want to set multiple properties at once? This is where shorthands like margin and padding become useful. But they are currently limited to setting physical dimension. Logical properties are great, but they still feel like a second-class feature of the language.

There are a few 2-value shorthands that have been implemented, like margin-block for setting both the -block-start and -block-endmargins. I find those extremely useful and concise. But the existing 4-value shorthands feel stuck in the past. It’s surprising that a size shorthand can’t set the inline-size, and the inset shorthand doesn’t include inset-block-start. Is there any way to update those shorthand properties so that they can be used to set logical dimensions?

She ends with the money question, whether we can do anything about it. We’re currently in a position of having to choose between supporting flow-relative terms like block-start and inline-start with longhand properties and the ergonomic benefits of writing shorthand properties that are evaluated as physical terms like top, bottom, left, and right. Those of us writing CSS for a while likely have the muscle memory to adapt accordingly, but it’s otherwise a decision that has real consequences, particularly for multi-lingual sites.

Note that Miriam says this is something the CSS Working Group has been working on since 2017. And there’s a little momentum to pick it up and do something about it. The first thing you can do is support Miriam’s work — everything she does with the CSS Working Group (and it’s a lot) is a labor of love and relies on sponsorships, so chipping in is one way to push things forward.

The other thing you can do is chime into Miriam’s proposal that she published in 2021. I think it’s a solid idea. We can’t simply switch from physical to flow-relative terms in shorthand properties without triggering compatibility issues, so having some sort of higher-level instruction for CSS at the top of the stylesheet, perhaps as an at-rule that specifies which “mode” we’re in.

<coordinate-mode> = [ logical | physical ] or [ relative | absolute ] or ... @mode <coordinate-mode>; /* must come after @import and before any style rules */ @mode <coordinate-mode> { <stylesheet> } selector { property: value !<coordinate-mode>; }

Perhaps naming aside, it seems pretty reasonable, eh?

Support Logical Shorthands in CSS originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

In my last article on “Revisiting CSS Multi-Column Layout”, I mentioned that almost twenty years have flown by since I wrote my first book, Transcending CSS. In it, I explained how and why to use what were, at the time, an emerging CSS property.

Ten years later, I wrote the Hardboiled Web Design Fifth Anniversary Edition, covering similar ground and introducing the new CSS border-image property.

Hint: I published an updated version, Transcending CSS Revisited which is free to read online. Hardboiled Web Design is available from my bookshop.

I was very excited about the possibilities this new property would offer. After all, we could now add images to the borders of any element, even table cells and rows (unless their borders had been set to collapse).

Since then, I’ve used border-image regularly. Yet, it remains one of the most underused CSS tools, and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. Is it possible that people steer clear of border-image because its syntax is awkward and unintuitive? Perhaps it’s because most explanations don’t solve the type of creative implementation problems that most people need to solve. Most likely, it’s both.

I’ve recently been working on a new website for Emmy-award-winning game composer Mike Worth. He hired me to create a highly graphical design that showcases his work, and I used border-image throughout.

Design by Andy Clarke, Stuff & Nonsense. Mike Worth’s website will launch in April 2025, but you can see examples from this article on CodePen. A brief overview of properties and values

First, here’s a short refresher. Most border-image explanations begin with this highly illuminating code snippet:

border-image: \[source\] [slice]/\[width]/[outset\] [repeat]

This is shorthand for a set of border-image properties, but it’s best to deal with properties individually to grasp the concept more easily.

A border-image’s source

I’ll start with the source of the bitmap or vector format image or CSS gradient to be inserted into the border space:

border-image-source: url('/img/scroll.png');

When I insert SVG images into a border, I have several choices as to how. I could use an external SVG file:

border-image-source: url('/img/scroll.svg');

Or I might convert my SVG to data URI using a tool like Base64.Guru although, as both SVG and HTML are XML-based, this isn’t recommended:

border-image-source: url('data:image/svg+xml;base64,…');

Instead, I can add the SVG code directly into the source URL value and save one unnecessary HTTP request:

border-image-source: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,…');

Finally, I could insert an entirely CSS-generated conical, linear, or radial gradient into my border:

border-image-source: conical-gradient(…);

Tip: It’s useful to remember that a browser renders a border-image above an element’s background and box-shadow but below its content. More on that a little later.

Slicing up a border-image

Now that I’ve specified the source of a border image, I can apply it to a border by slicing it up and using the parts in different positions around an element. This can be the most baffling aspect for people new to border-image.

Most border-image explanations show an example where the pieces will simply be equally-sized, like this:

However, a border-image can be developed from any shape, no matter how complex or irregular.

Instead of simply inserting an image into a border and watching it repeat around an element, invisible cut-lines slice up a border-image into nine parts. These lines are similar to the slice guides found in graphics applications. The pieces are, in turn, inserted into the nine regions of an element’s border.

The border-image-slice property defines the size of each slice by specifying the distance from each edge of the image. I could use the same distance from every edge:

border-image-slice: 65

I can combine top/bottom and left/right values:

border-image-slice: 115 65;

Or, I can specify distance values for all four cut-lines, running clockwise: top, right, bottom, left:

border-image-slice: 65 65 115 125;

The top-left of an image will be used on the top-left corner of an element’s border. The bottom-right will be used on the bottom-right, and so on.

I don’t need to add units to border-image-slice values when using a bitmap image as the browser correctly assumes bitmaps use pixels. The SVG viewBox makes using them a little different, so I also prefer to specify their height and width:

<svg height="600px" width="600px">…</svg>

Don’t forget to set the widths of these borders, as without them, there will be nowhere for a border’s image to display:

border-image-width: 65px 65px 115px 125px; Filling in the center

So far, I’ve used all four corners and sides of my image, but what about the center? By default, the browser will ignore the center of an image after it’s been sliced. But I can put it to use by adding the fill keyword to my border-image-slice value:

border-image-slice: 65px 65px 115px 125px fill; Setting up repeats

With the corners of my border images in place, I can turn my attention to the edges between them. As you might imagine, the slice at the top of an image will be placed on the top edge. The same is true of the right, bottom, and left edges. In a flexible design, we never know how wide or tall these edges will be, so I can fine-tune how images will repeat or stretch when they fill an edge.

Stretch: When a sliced image is flat or smooth, it can stretch to fill any height or width. Even a tiny 65px slice can stretch to hundreds or thousands of pixels without degrading.

border-image-repeat: stretch;

Repeat: If an image has texture, stretching it isn’t an option, so it can repeat to fill any height or width.

border-image-repeat: repeat;

Round: If an image has a pattern or shape that can’t be stretched and I need to match the edges of the repeat, I can specify that the repeat be round. A browser will resize the image so that only whole pieces display inside an edge.

border-image-repeat: round;

Space: Similar to round, when using the space property, only whole pieces will display inside an edge. But instead of resizing the image, a browser will add spaces into the repeat.

border-image-repeat: space;

When I need to specify a separate stretch, repeat, round, or space value for each edge, I can use multiple keywords:

border-image-repeat: stretch round; Outsetting a border-image

There can be times when I need an image to extend beyond an element’s border-box. Using the border-image-outset property, I can do just that. The simplest syntax extends the border image evenly on all sides by 10px:

border-image-outset: 10px;

Of course, there being four borders on every element, I could also specify each outset individually:

border-image-outset: 20px 10px; /* or */ border-image-outset: 20px 10px 0; border-image in action

Mike Worth is a video game composer who’s won an Emmy for his work. He loves ’90s animation — especially Disney’s Duck Tales — and he asked me to create custom artwork and develop a bold, retro-style design.

My challenge when developing for Mike was implementing my highly graphical design without compromising performance, especially on mobile devices. While it’s normal in CSS to accomplish the same goal in several ways, here, border-image often proved to be the most efficient.

Decorative buttons

The easiest and most obvious place to start was creating buttons reminiscent of stone tablets with chipped and uneven edges.

I created an SVG of the tablet shape and added it to my buttons using border-image:

button { border-image-repeat: stretch; border-image-slice: 10 10 10 10 fill; border-image-source: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,…'); border-image-width: 20px; }

I set the border-image-repeat on all edges to stretch and the center slice to fill so these stone tablet-style buttons expand along with their content to any height or width.

CodePen Embed Fallback Article scroll

I want every aspect of Mike’s website design to express his brand. That means continuing the ’90s cartoon theme in his long-form content by turning it into a paper scroll.

The markup is straightforward with just a single article element:

<article> <!-- ... --> </article>

But, I struggled to decide how to implement the paper effect. My first thought was to divide my scroll into three separate SVG files (top, middle, and bottom) and use pseudo-elements to add the rolled up top and bottom parts of the scroll. I started by applying a vertically repeating graphic to the middle of my article:

article { padding: 10rem 8rem; box-sizing: border-box; /* Scroll middle */ background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,…'); background-position: center; background-repeat: repeat-y; background-size: contain; }

Then, I added two pseudo-elements, each containing its own SVG content:

article:before { display: block; position: relative; top: -30px; /* Scroll top */ content: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,…'); } article:after { display: block; position: relative; top: 50px; /* Scroll bottom */ content: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,…'); }

While this implementation worked as expected, using two pseudo-elements and three separate SVG files felt clumsy. However, using border-image, one SVG, and no pseudo-elements feels more elegant and significantly reduces the amount of code needed to implement the effect.

I started by creating an SVG of the complete tablet shape:

And I worked out the position of the four cut-lines:

Then, I inserted this single SVG into my article’s border by first selecting the source, slicing the image, and setting the top and bottom edges to stretch and the left and right edges to round:

article { border-image-slice: 150 95 150 95 fill; border-image-width: 150px 95px 150px 95px; border-image-repeat: stretch round; border-image-source: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,…'); }

The result is a flexible paper scroll effect which adapts to both the viewport width and any amount or type of content.

CodePen Embed Fallback Home page overlay

My final challenge was implementing the action-packed graphic I’d designed for Mike Worth’s home page. This contains a foreground SVG featuring Mike’s orangutan mascot and a zooming background graphic:

<section> <!-- content --> <div>...</div> <!-- ape --> <div> <svg>…</svg> </div> </section>

I defined the section as a positioning context for its children:

section { position: relative; }

Then, I absolutely positioned a pseudo-element and added the zooming graphic to its background:

section:before { content: ""; position: absolute; z-index: -1; background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,…'); background-position: center center; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 100%; }

I wanted this graphic to spin and add subtle movement to the panel, so I applied a simple CSS animation to the pseudo-element:

@keyframes spin-bg { from { transform: rotate(0deg); } to { transform: rotate(360deg); } } section:before { animation: spin-bg 240s linear infinite; }

Next, I added a CSS mask to fade the edges of the zooming graphic into the background. The CSS mask-image property specifies a mask layer image, which can be a PNG image, an SVG image or mask, or a CSS gradient:

section:before { mask-image: radial-gradient(circle, rgb(0 0 0) 0%, rgb(0 0 0 / 0) 60%); mask-repeat: no-repeat; }

At this point, you might wonder where a border image could be used in this design. To add more interactivity to the graphic, I wanted to reduce its opacity and change its color — by adding a colored gradient overlay — when someone interacts with it. One of the simplest, but rarely-used, methods for applying an overlay to an element is using border-image. First, I added a default opacity and added a brief transition:

section:before { opacity: 1; transition: opacity .25s ease-in-out; }

Then, on hover, I reduced the opacity to .5 and added a border-image:

section:hover::before { opacity: .5; border-image: fill 0 linear-gradient(rgba(0,0,255,.25),rgba(255,0,0,1)); }

You may ponder why I’ve not used the other border-image values I explained earlier, so I’ll dissect that declaration. First is the border-image-slice value, where zero pixels ensures that the eight corners and edges stay empty. The fill keyword ensures the middle section is filled with the linear gradient. Second, the border-image-source is a CSS linear gradient that blends blue into red. A browser renders this border-image above the background but behind the content.

CodePen Embed Fallback Conclusion: You should take a fresh look at border-image

The border-image property is a powerful, yet often overlooked, CSS tool that offers incredible flexibility. By slicing, repeating, and outsetting images, you can create intricate borders, decorative elements, and even dynamic overlays with minimal code.

In my work for Mike Worth’s website, border-image proved invaluable, improving performance while maintaining a highly graphical aesthetic. Whether used for buttons, interactive overlays, or larger graphic elements, border-image can create visually striking designs without relying on extra markup or multiple assets.

If you’ve yet to experiment with border-image, now’s the time to revisit its potential and add it to your design toolkit.

Hint: Mike Worth’s website will launch in April 2025, but you can see examples from this article on CodePen.

About Andy Clarke

Often referred to as one of the pioneers of web design, Andy Clarke has been instrumental in pushing the boundaries of web design and is known for his creative and visually stunning designs. His work has inspired countless designers to explore the full potential of product and website design.

Andy’s written several industry-leading books, including Transcending CSS, Hardboiled Web Design, and Art Direction for the Web. He’s also worked with businesses of all sizes and industries to achieve their goals through design.

Visit Andy’s studio, Stuff & Nonsense, and check out his Contract Killer, the popular web design contract template trusted by thousands of web designers and developers.

Revisiting CSS border-image originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

I’ve seen a handful of recent posts talking about the utility of the :is() relational pseudo-selector. No need to delve into the details other than to say it can help make compound selectors a lot more readable.

:is(section, article, aside, nav) :is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) { color: #BADA55; } /* ... which would be the equivalent of: */ section h1, section h2, section h3, section h4, section h5, section h6, article h1, article h2, article h3, article h4, article h5, article h6, aside h1, aside h2, aside h3, aside h4, aside h5, aside h6, nav h1, nav h2, nav h3, nav h4, nav h5, nav h6 { color: #BADA55; }

There’s just one catch: the specificity. The selector’s specificity matches the most specific selector in the function’s arguments. That’s not a big deal when working with a relatively flat style structure containing mostly element and class selectors, but if you toss an ID in there, then that’s the specificity you’re stuck with.

/* Specificity: 0 0 1 */ :is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) { color: #BADA55; } /* Specificity: 1 0 0 */ :is(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, #id) { color: #BADA55; }

That can be a neat thing! For example, you might want to intentionally toss a made-up ID in there to force a style the same way you might do with the !important keyword.

What if you don’t want that? Some articles suggest nesting selectors instead which is cool but not quite with the same nice writing ergonomics.

There’s where I want to point to the :where() selector instead! It’s the exact same thing as :is() but without the specificity baggage. It always carries a specificity score of zero. You might even think of it as a sort of specificity reset.

/* Specificity: 0 0 0 */ :where(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) { color: #BADA55; } /* Specificity: 0 0 0 */ :where(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, #id) { color: #BADA55; }

So, is there a certain selector hijacking your :is() specificity? You might want :where() instead.

Quick Reminder That :is() and :where() Are Basically the Same With One Key Difference originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Scott Jehl released a course called Web Components Demystified. I love that name because it says what the course is about right on the tin: you’re going to learn about web components and clear up any confusion you may already have about them.

And there’s plenty of confusion to go around! “Components” is already a loaded term that’s come to mean everything from a piece of UI, like a search component, to an element you can drop in and reuse anywhere, such as a React component. The web is chock-full of components, tell you what.

But what we’re talking about here is a set of standards where HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rally together so that we can create custom elements that behave exactly how we want them to. It’s how we can make an element called <tasty-pizza> and the browser knows what to do with it.

This is my full set of notes from Scott’s course. I wouldn’t say they’re complete or even a direct one-to-one replacement for watching the course. You’ll still want to do that on your own, and I encourage you to because Scott is an excellent teacher who makes all of this stuff extremely accessible, even to noobs like me.

Chapter 1: What Web Components Are… and Aren’t

Web components are not built-in elements, even though that’s what they might look like at first glance. Rather, they are a set of technologies that allow us to instruct what the element is and how it behaves. Think of it the same way that “responsive web design” is not a thing but rather a set of strategies for adapting design to different web contexts. So, just as responsive web design is a set of ingredients — including media fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries — web components are a concoction involving:

Custom elements

These are HTML elements that are not built into the browser. We make them up. They include a letter and a dash.

<my-fancy-heading> Hey, I'm Fancy </my-fancy-heading>

We’ll go over these in greater detail in the next module.

HTML templates

Templates are bits of reusable markup that generate more markup. We can hide something until we make use of it.

<template> <li class="user"> <h2 class="name"></h2> <p class="bio"></p> </li> </template>

Much more on this in the third module.

Shadow DOM

The DOM is queryable.

document.querySelector("h1"); // <h1>Hello, World</h1>

The Shadow DOM is a fragment of the DOM where markup, scripts, and styles are encapsulated from other DOM elements. We’ll cover this in the fourth module, including how to <slot> content.

There used to be a fourth “ingredient” called HTML Imports, but those have been nixed.

In short, web components might be called “components” but they aren’t really components more than technologies. In React, components sort of work like partials. It defines a snippet of HTML that you drop into your code and it outputs in the DOM. Web Components are built off of HTML Elements. They are not replaced when rendered the way they are in JavaScript component frameworks. Web components are quite literally HTML elements and have to obey HTML rules. For example:

<!-- Nope --> <ul> <my-list-item></my-list-item> <!-- etc. --> </ul> <!-- Yep --> <ul> <li> <my-list-item></my-list-item> </li> </ul>

We’re generating meaningful HTML up-front rather than rendering it in the browser through the client after the fact. Provide the markup and enhance it! Web components have been around a while now, even if it seems we’re only starting to talk about them now.

Chapter 2: Custom Elements

First off, custom elements are not built-in HTML elements. We instruct what they are and how they behave. They are named with a dash and at must contain least one letter. All of the following are valid names for custom elements:

• <super-component>
• <a->
• <a-4->
• <card-10.0.1>
• <card-♠️>

Just remember that there are some reserved names for MathML and SVG elements, like <font-face>. Also, they cannot be void elements, e.g. <my-element />, meaning they have to have a correspoonding closing tag.

Since custom elements are not built-in elements, they are undefined by default — and being undefined can be a useful thing! That means we can use them as containers with default properties. For example, they are display: inline by default and inherit the current font-family, which can be useful to pass down to the contents. We can also use them as styling hooks since they can be selected in CSS. Or maybe they can be used for accessibility hints. The bottom line is that they do not require JavaScript in order to make them immediately useful.

Working with JavaScript. If there is one <my-button> on the page, we can query it and set a click handler on it with an event listener. But if we were to insert more instances on the page later, we would need to query it when it’s appended and re-run the function since it is not part of the original document rendering.

Defining a custom element

This defines and registers the custom element. It teaches the browser that this is an instance of the Custom Elements API and extends the same class that makes other HTML elements valid HTML elements:

<my-element>My Element</my-element> <script> customElements.define("my-element", class extends HTMLElement {}); </script>

Check out the methods we get immediate access to:

Breaking down the syntax customElements .define( "my-element", class extends HTMLElement {} ); // Functionally the same as: class MyElement extends HTMLElement {} customElements.define("my-element", MyElement); export default myElement // ...which makes it importable by other elements: import MyElement from './MyElement.js'; const myElement = new MyElement(); document.body.appendChild(myElement); // <body> // <my-element></my-element> // </body> // Or simply pull it into a page // Don't need to `export default` but it doesn't hurt to leave it // <my-element>My Element</my-element> // <script type="module" src="my-element.js"></script>

It’s possible to define a custom element by extending a specific HTML element. The specification documents this, but Scott is focusing on the primary way.

class WordCount extends HTMLParagraphElement customElements.define("word-count", WordCount, { extends: "p" }); // <p is="word-count">This is a custom paragraph!</p>

Scott says do not use this because WebKit is not going to implement it. We would have to polyfill it forever, or as long as WebKit holds out. Consider it a dead end.

The lifecycle

A component has various moments in its “life” span:

• Constructed (constructor)
• Connected (connectedCallback)
• Adopted (adoptedCallback)
• Attribute Changed (attributeChangedCallback)
• Disconnected (disconnectedCallback)

We can hook into these to define the element’s behavior.

class myElement extends HTMLElement { constructor() {} connectedCallback() {} adoptedCallback() {} attributeChangedCallback() {} disconnectedCallback() {} } customElements.define("my-element", MyElement); constructor() class myElement extends HTMLElement { constructor() { // provides us with the `this` keyword super() // add a property this.someProperty = "Some value goes here"; // add event listener this.addEventListener("click", () => {}); } } customElements.define("my-element", MyElement);

“When the constructor is called, do this…” We don’t have to have a constructor when working with custom elements, but if we do, then we need to call super() because we’re extending another class and we’ll get all of those properties.

Constructor is useful, but not for a lot of things. It’s useful for setting up initial state, registering default properties, adding event listeners, and even creating Shadow DOM (which Scott will get into in a later module). For example, we are unable to sniff out whether or not the custom element is in another element because we don’t know anything about its parent container yet (that’s where other lifecycle methods come into play) — we’ve merely defined it.

connectedCallback() class myElement extends HTMLElement { // the constructor is unnecessary in this example but doesn't hurt. constructor() { super() } // let me know when my element has been found on the page. connectedCallback() { console.log(`${this.nodeName} was added to the page.`); } } customElements.define("my-element", MyElement);

Note that there is some strangeness when it comes to timing things. Sometimes isConnected returns true during the constructor. connectedCallback() is our best way to know when the component is found on the page. This is the moment it is connected to the DOM. Use it to attach event listeners.

If the <script> tag comes before the DOM is parsed, then it might not recognize childNodes. This is not an uncommon situation. But if we add type="module" to the <script>, then the script is deferred and we get the child nodes. Using setTimeout can also work, but it looks a little gross.

disconnectedCallback class myElement extends HTMLElement { // let me know when my element has been found on the page. disconnectedCallback() { console.log(`${this.nodeName} was removed from the page.`); } } customElements.define("my-element", MyElement);

This is useful when the component needs to be cleaned up, perhaps like stopping an animation or preventing memory links.

adoptedCallback()

This is when the component is adopted by another document or page. Say you have some iframes on a page and move a custom element from the page into an iframe, then it would be adopted in that scenario. It would be created, then added, then removed, then adopted, then added again. That’s a full lifecycle! This callback is adopted automatically simply by picking it up and dragging it between documents in the DOM.

Custom elements and attributes

Unlike React, HTML attributes are strings (not props!). Global attributes work as you’d expect, though some global attributes are reflected as properties. You can make any attribute do that if you want, just be sure to use care and caution when naming because, well, we don’t want any conflicts.

Avoid standard attributes on a custom element as well, as that can be confusing particularly when handing a component to another developer. Example: using type as an attribute which is also used by <input> elements. We could say data-type instead. (Remember that Chris has a comprehensive guide on using data attributes.)

Examples

Here’s a quick example showing how to get a greeting attribute and set it on the custom element:

class MyElement extends HTMLElement { get greeting() { return this.getAttribute('greeting'); // return this.hasAttribute('greeting'); } set greeting(val) { if(val) { this.setAttribute('greeting', val); // this setAttribute('greeting', ''); } else { this.removeAttribute('greeting'); } } } customElements.define("my-element", MyElement);

Another example, this time showing a callback for when the attribute has changed, which prints it in the element’s contents:

<my-element greeting="hello">hello</my-element> <!-- Change text greeting when attribite greeting changes --> <script> class MyElement extends HTMLElement { static observedAttributes = ["greeting"]; attributeChangedCallback(name, oldValue, newValue) { if (name === 'greeting' && oldValue && oldValue !== newValue) { console.log(name + " changed"); this.textContent = newValue; } } } customElements.define("my-element", MyElement); </script>

A few more custom element methods:

customElements.get('my-element'); // returns MyElement Class customElements.getName(MyElement); // returns 'my-element' customElements.whenDefined("my-element"); // waits for custom element to be defined const el = document.createElement("spider-man"); class SpiderMan extends HTMLElement { constructor() { super(); console.log("constructor!!"); } } customElements.define("spider-man", SpiderMan); customElements.upgrade(el); // returns "constructor!!"

Custom methods and events:

<my-element><button>My Element</button></my-element> <script> customElements.define("my-element", class extends HTMLElement { connectedCallback() { const btn = this.firstElementChild; btn.addEventListener("click", this.handleClick) } handleClick() { console.log(this); } }); </script>

Bring your own base class, in the same way web components frameworks like Lit do:

class BaseElement extends HTMLElement { $ = this.querySelector; } // extend the base, use its helper class myElement extends BaseElement { firstLi = this.$("li"); } Practice prompt

Create a custom HTML element called <say-hi> that displays the text “Hi, World!” when added to the page:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Enhance the element to accept a name attribute, displaying "Hi, [Name]!" instead:

CodePen Embed Fallback Chapter 3: HTML Templates

The <template> element is not for users but developers. It is not exposed visibly by browsers.

<template>The browser ignores everything in here.</template>

Templates are designed to hold HTML fragments:

<template> <div class="user-profile"> <h2 class="name">Scott</h2> <p class="bio">Author</p> </div> </template>

A template is selectable in CSS; it just doesn’t render. It’s a document fragment. The inner document is a #document-fragment. Not sure why you’d do this, but it illustrates the point that templates are selectable:

template { display: block; }` /* Nope */ template + div { height: 100px; width: 100px; } /* Works */ The content property

No, not in CSS, but JavaScript. We can query the inner contents of a template and print them somewhere else.

<template> <p>Hi</p> </template> <script> const myTmpl = documenty.querySelector("template").content; console.log(myTmpl); </script> Using a Document Fragment without a <template> const myFrag = document.createDocumentFragment(); myFrag.innerHTML = "<p>Test</p>"; // Nope const myP = document.createElement("p"); // Yep myP.textContent = "Hi!"; myFrag.append(myP); // use the fragment document.body.append(myFrag); Clone a node <template> <p>Hi</p> </template> <script> const myTmpl = documenty.querySelector("template").content; console.log(myTmpl); // Oops, only works one time! We need to clone it. </script>

Oops, the component only works one time! We need to clone it if we want multiple instances:

<template> <p>Hi</p> </template> <script> const myTmpl = document.querySelector("template").content; document.body.append(myTmpl.cloneNode(true)); // true is necessary document.body.append(myTmpl.cloneNode(true)); document.body.append(myTmpl.cloneNode(true)); document.body.append(myTmpl.cloneNode(true)); </script> A more practical example

Let’s stub out a template for a list item and then insert them into an unordered list:

<template id="tmpl-user"><li><strong></strong>: <span></span></li></template> <ul id="users"></ul> <script> const usersElement = document.querySelector("#users"); const userTmpl = document.querySelector("#tmpl-user").content; const users = [{name: "Bob", title: "Artist"}, {name: "Jane", title: "Doctor"}]; users.forEach(user => { let thisLi = userTmpl.cloneNode(true); thisLi.querySelector("strong").textContent = user.name; thisLi.querySelector("span").textContent = user.title; usersElement.append(thisLi); }); </script>

The other way to use templates that we’ll get to in the next module: Shadow DOM

<template shadowroot=open> <p>Hi, I'm in the Shadow DOM</p> </template> Chapter 4: Shadow DOM

Here we go, this is a heady chapter! The Shadow DOM reminds me of playing bass in a band: it’s easy to understand but incredibly difficult to master. It’s easy to understand that there are these nodes in the DOM that are encapsulated from everything else. They’re there, we just can’t really touch them with regular CSS and JavaScript without some finagling. It’s the finagling that’s difficult to master. There are times when the Shadow DOM is going to be your best friend because it prevents outside styles and scripts from leaking in and mucking things up. Then again, you’re most certainly going go want to style or apply scripts to those nodes and you have to figure that part out.

That’s where web components really shine. We get the benefits of an element that’s encapsulated from outside noise but we’re left with the responsibility of defining everything for it ourselves.

Select elements are a great example of the Shadow DOM. Shadow roots! Slots! They’re all part of the puzzle. Using the Shadow DOM

We covered the <template> element in the last chapter and determined that it renders in the Shadow DOM without getting displayed on the page.

<template shadowrootmode="closed"> <p>This will render in the Shadow DOM.</p> </template>

In this case, the <template> is rendered as a #shadow-root without the <template> element’s tags. It’s a fragment of code. So, while the paragraph inside the template is rendered, the <template> itself is not. It effectively marks the Shadow DOM’s boundaries. If we were to omit the shadowrootmode attribute, then we simply get an unrendered template. Either way, though, the paragraph is there in the DOM and it is encapsulated from other styles and scripts on the page.

These are all of the elements that can have a shadow. Breaching the shadow

There are times you’re going to want to “pierce” the Shadow DOM to allow for some styling and scripts. The content is relatively protected but we can open the shadowrootmode and allow some access.

<div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <p>This will render in the Shadow DOM.</p> </template> </div>

Now we can query the div that contains the <template> and select the #shadow-root:

document.querySelector("div").shadowRoot // #shadow-root (open) // <p>This will render in the Shadow DOM.</p>

We need that <div> in there so we have something to query in the DOM to get to the paragraph. Remember, the <template> is not actually rendered at all.

Additional shadow attributes <!-- should this root stay with a parent clone? --> <template shadowrootcloneable> <!-- allow shadow to be serialized into a string object — can forget about this --> <template shadowrootserializable> <!-- click in element focuses first focusable element --> <template shadowrootdelegatesfocus> Shadow DOM siblings

When you add a shadow root, it becomes the only rendered root in that shadow host. Any elements after a shadow root node in the DOM simply don’t render. If a DOM element contains more than one shadow root node, the ones after the first just become template tags. It’s sort of like the Shadow DOM is a monster that eats the siblings.

Slots bring those siblings back!

<div> <template shadowroot="closed"> <slot></slot> <p>I'm a sibling of a shadow root, and I am visible.</p> </template> </div>

All of the siblings go through the slots and are distributed that way. It’s sort of like slots allow us to open the monster’s mouth and see what’s inside.

Declaring the Shadow DOM

Using templates is the declarative way to define the Shadow DOM. We can also define the Shadow DOM imperatively using JavaScript. So, this is doing the exact same thing as the last code snippet, only it’s done programmatically in JavaScript:

<my-element> <template shadowroot="open"> <p>This will render in the Shadow DOM.</p> </template> </my-element> <script> customElements.define('my-element', class extends HTMLElement { constructor() { super(); // attaches a shadow root node this.attachShadow({mode: "open"}); // inserts a slot into the template this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<slot></slot>'; } }); </script>

Another example:

<my-status>available</my-status> <script> customElements.define('my-status', class extends HTMLElement { constructor() { super(); this.attachShadow({mode: "open"}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<p>This item is currently: <slot></slot></p>'; } }); </script>

So, is it better to be declarative or imperative? Like the weather where I live, it just depends.

Both approaches have their benefits.

We can set the shadow mode via Javascript as well:

// open this.attachShadow({mode: open}); // closed this.attachShadow({mode: closed}); // cloneable this.attachShadow({cloneable: true}); // delegateFocus this.attachShadow({delegatesFocus: true}); // serialized this.attachShadow({serializable: true}); // Manually assign an element to a slot this.attachShadow({slotAssignment: "manual"});

About that last one, it says we have to manually insert the <slot> elements in JavaScript:

<my-element> <p>This WILL render in shadow DOM but not automatically.</p> </my-element> <script> customElements.define('my-element', class extends HTMLElement { constructor() { super(); this.attachShadow({ mode: "open", slotAssignment: "manual" }); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<slot></slot>'; } connectedCallback(){ const slotElem = this.querySelector('p'); this.shadowRoot.querySelector('slot').assign(slotElem); } }); </script> Examples

Scott spent a great deal of time sharing examples that demonstrate different sorts of things you might want to do with the Shadow DOM when working with web components. I’ll rapid-fire those in here.

Get an array of element nodes in a slot this.shadowRoot.querySelector('slot') .assignedElements(); // get an array of all nodes in a slot, text too this.shadowRoot.querySelector('slot') .assignedNodes(); When did a slot’s nodes change? let slot = document.querySelector('div') .shadowRoot.querySelector("slot"); slot.addEventListener("slotchange", (e) => { console.log(`Slot "${slot.name}" changed`); // > Slot "saying" changed }) Combining imperative Shadow DOM with templates

Back to this example:

<my-status>available</my-status> <script> customElements.define('my-status', class extends HTMLElement { constructor() { super(); this.attachShadow({mode: "open"}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<p>This item is currently: <slot></slot></p>'; } }); </script>

Let’s get that string out of our JavaScript with reusable imperative shadow HTML:

<my-status>available</my-status> <template id="my-status"> <p>This item is currently: <slot></slot> </p> </template> <script> customElements.define('my-status', class extends HTMLElement { constructor(){ super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); const template = document.getElementById('my-status'); this.shadowRoot.append(template.content.cloneNode(true)); } }); </script>

Slightly better as it grabs the component’s name programmatically to prevent name collisions:

<my-status>available</my-status> <template id="my-status"> <p>This item is currently: <slot></slot> </p> </template> <script> customElements.define('my-status', class extends HTMLElement { constructor(){ super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); const template = document.getElementById( this.nodeName.toLowerCase() ); this.shadowRoot.append(template.content.cloneNode(true)); } }); </script> Forms with Shadow DOM

Long story, cut short: maybe don’t create custom form controls as web components. We get a lot of free features and functionalities — including accessibility — with native form controls that we have to recreate from scratch if we decide to roll our own.

In the case of forms, one of the oddities of encapsulation is that form submissions are not automatically connected. Let’s look at a broken form that contains a web component for a custom input:

<form> <my-input> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <label> <slot></slot> <input type="text" name="your-name"> </label> </template> Type your name! </my-input> <label><input type="checkbox" name="remember">Remember Me</label> <button>Submit</button> </form> <script> document.forms[0].addEventListener('input', function(){ let data = new FormData(this); console.log(new URLSearchParams(data).toString()); }); </script>

This input’s value won’t be in the submission! Also, form validation and states are not communicated in the Shadow DOM. Similar connectivity issues with accessibility, where the shadow boundary can interfere with ARIA. For example, IDs are local to the Shadow DOM. Consider how much you really need the Shadow DOM when working with forms.

Element internals

The moral of the last section is to tread carefully when creating your own web components for form controls. Scott suggests avoiding that altogether, but he continued to demonstrate how we could theoretically fix functional and accessibility issues using element internals.

Let’s start with an input value that will be included in the form submission.

<form> <my-input name="name"></my-input> <button>Submit</button> </form>

Now let’s slot this imperatively:

<script> customElements.define('my-input', class extends HTMLElement { constructor() { super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<label><slot></slot><input type="text"></label>' } }); </script>

The value is not communicated yet. We’ll add a static formAssociated variable with internals attached:

<script> customElements.define('my-input', class extends HTMLElement { static formAssociated = true; constructor() { super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<label><slot></slot><input type="text"></label>' this.internals = this.attachedInternals(); } }); </script>

Then we’ll set the form value as part of the internals when the input’s value changes:

<script> customElements.define('my-input', class extends HTMLElement { static formAssociated = true; constructor() { super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<label><slot></slot><input type="text"></label>' this.internals = this.attachedInternals(); this.addEventListener('input', () => { this-internals.setFormValue(this.shadowRoot.querySelector('input').value); }); } }); </script>

Here’s how we set states with element internals:

// add a checked state this.internals.states.add("checked"); // remove a checked state this.internals.states.delete("checked");

Let’s toggle a “add” or “delete” a boolean state:

<form> <my-check name="remember">Remember Me?</my-check> </form> <script> customElements.define('my-check', class extends HTMLElement { static formAssociated = true; constructor(){ super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<slot></slot>'; this.internals = this.attachInternals(); let addDelete = false; this.addEventListener("click", ()=> { addDelete = !addDelete; this.internals.states[addDelete ? "add" : "delete"]("checked"); } ); } }); </script>

Let’s refactor this for ARIA improvements:

<form> <style> my-check { display: inline-block; inline-size: 1em; block-size: 1em; background: #eee; } my-check:state(checked)::before { content: "[x]"; } </style> <my-check name="remember" id="remember"></my-check><label for="remember">Remember Me?</label> </form> <script> customElements.define('my-check', class extends HTMLElement { static formAssociated = true; constructor(){ super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); this.internals = this.attachInternals(); this.internals.role = 'checkbox'; this.setAttribute('tabindex', '0'); let addDelete = false; this.addEventListener("click", ()=> { addDelete = !addDelete; this.internals.states[addDelete ? "add" : "delete"]("checked"); this[addDelete ? "setAttribute" : "removeAttribute"]("aria-checked", true); }); } }); </script>

Phew, that’s a lot of work! And sure, this gets us a lot closer to a more functional and accessible custom form input, but there’s still a long way’s to go to achieve what we already get for free from using native form controls. Always question whether you can rely on a light DOM form instead.

Chapter 5: Styling Web Components

Styling web components comes in levels of complexity. For example, we don’t need any JavaScript at all to slap a few styles on a custom element.

<my-element theme="suave" class="priority"> <h1>I'm in the Light DOM!</h1> </my-element> <style> /* Element, class, attribute, and complex selectors all work. */ my-element { display: block; /* custom elements are inline by default */ } .my-element[theme=suave] { color: #fff; } .my-element.priority { background: purple; } .my-element h1 { font-size: 3rem; } </style>

• This is not encapsulated! This is scoped off of a single element just light any other CSS in the Light DOM.
• Changing the Shadow DOM mode from closed to open doesn’t change CSS. It allows JavaScript to pierce the Shadow DOM but CSS isn’t affected.

Let’s poke at it <style> p { color: red; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <p>Hi</p> </template> </div> <p>Hi</p>

• This is three stacked paragraphs, the second of which is in the shadow root.
• The first and third paragraphs are red; the second is not styled because it is in a <template>, even if the shadow root’s mode is set to open.

Let’s poke at it from the other direction:

<style> p { color: red; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> p { color: blue;} </style> <p>Hi</p> </template> </div> <p>Hi</p>

• The first and third paragraphs are still receiving the red color from the Light DOM’s CSS.
• The <style> declarations in the <template> are encapsulated and do not leak out to the other paragraphs, even though it is declared later in the cascade.

Same idea, but setting the color on the <body>:

<style> body { color: red; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <p>Hi</p> </template> </div> <p>Hi</p>

• Everything is red! This isn’t a bug. Inheritable styles do pass through the Shadow DOM barrier.
• Inherited styles are those that are set by the computed values of their parent styles. Many properties are inheritable, including color. The <body> is the parent and everything in it is a child that inherits these styles, including custom elements.

Let’s fight with inheritance

We can target the paragraph in the <template> style block to override the styles set on the <body>. Those won’t leak back to the other paragraphs.

<style> body { color: red; font-family: fantasy; font-size: 2em; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> /* reset the light dom styles */ p { color: initial; font-family: initial; font-size: initial; } </style> <p>Hi</p> </template> </div> <p>Hi</p>

• This is protected, but the problem here is that it’s still possible for a new role or property to be introduced that passes along inherited styles that we haven’t thought to reset.
• Perhaps we could use all: initital as a defensive strategy against future inheritable styles. But what if we add more elements to the custom element? It’s a constant fight.

Host styles!

We can scope things to the shadow root’s :host selector to keep things protected.

<style> body { color: red; font-family: fantasy; font-size: 2em; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> /* reset the light dom styles */ :host { all: initial; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <a href="#">Click me</a> </template> </div> <p>Hi</p>

New problem! What if the Light DOM styles are scoped to the universal selector instead?

<style> * { color: red; font-family: fantasy; font-size: 2em; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> /* reset the light dom styles */ :host { all: initial; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <a href="#">Click me</a> </template> </div> <p>Hi</p>

This breaks the custom element’s styles. But that’s because Shadow DOM styles are applied before Light DOM styles. The styles scoped to the universal selector are simply applied after the :host styles, which overrides what we have in the shadow root. So, we’re still locked in a brutal fight over inheritance and need stronger specificity.

According to Scott, !important is one of the only ways we have to apply brute force to protect our custom elements from outside styles leaking in. The keyword gets a bad rap — and rightfully so in the vast majority of cases — but this is a case where it works well and using it is an encouraged practice. It’s not like it has an impact on the styles outside the custom element, anyway.

<style> * { color: red; font-family: fantasy; font-size: 2em; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> /* reset the light dom styles */ :host { all: initial; !important } </style> <p>Hi</p> <a href="#">Click me</a> </template> </div> <p>Hi</p> Special selectors

There are some useful selectors we have to look at components from the outside, looking in.

:host()

We just looked at this! But note how it is a function in addition to being a pseudo-selector. It’s sort of a parent selector in the sense that we can pass in the <div> that contains the <template> and that becomes the scoping context for the entire selector, meaning the !important keyword is no longer needed.

<style> * { color: red; font-family: fantasy; font-size: 2em; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> /* reset the light dom styles */ :host(div) { all: initial; } </style> <p>Hi</p> <a href="#">Click me</a> </template> </div> <p>Hi</p> :host-context() <header> <my-element> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> :host-context(header) { ... } /* matches the host! */ </style> </template> </my-element> </header>

This targets the shadow host but only if the provided selector is a parent node anywhere up the tree. This is super helpful for styling custom elements where the layout context might change, say, from being contained in an <article> versus being contained in a <header>.

:defined

Defining an element occurs when it is created, and this pseudo-selector is how we can select the element in that initially-defined state. I imagine this is mostly useful for when a custom element is defined imperatively in JavaScript so that we can target the very moment that the element is constructed, and then set styles right then and there.

<style> simple-custom:defined { display: block; background: green; color: #fff; } </style> <simple-custom></simple-custom> <script> customElements.define('simple-custom', class extends HTMLElement { constructor(){ super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = "<p>Defined!</p>"; } }); </script>

Minor note about protecting against a flash of unstyled content (FOUC)… or unstyled element in this case. Some elements are effectively useless until JavsScript has interacted with it to generate content. For example, an empty custom element that only becomes meaningful once JavaScript runs and generates content. Here’s how we can prevent the inevitable flash that happens after the content is generated:

<style> js-dependent-element:not(:defined) { visibility: hidden; } </style> <js-dependent-element></js-dependent-element>

Warning zone! It’s best for elements that are empty and not yet defined. If you’re working with a meaningful element up-front, then it’s best to style as much as you can up-front.

Styling slots

This does not style the paragraph green as you might expect:

<div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> p { color: green; } </style> <slot></slot> </template> <p>Slotted Element</p> </div>

The Shadow DOM cannot style this content directly. The styles would apply to a paragraph in the <template> that gets rendered in the Light DOM, but it cannot style it when it is slotted into the <template>.

Slots are part of the Light DOM. So, this works:

<style> p { color: green; } </style> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <slot></slot> </template> <p>Slotted Element</p> </div>

This means that slots are easier to target when it comes to piercing the shadow root with styles, making them a great method of progressive style enhancement.

We have another special selected, the ::slotted() pseudo-element that’s also a function. We pass it an element or class and that allows us to select elements from within the shadow root.

<div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> ::slotted(p) { color: red; } </style> <slot></slot> </template> <p>Slotted Element</p> </div>

Unfortunately, ::slotted() is a weak selected when compared to global selectors. So, if we were to make this a little more complicated by introducing an outside inheritable style, then we’d be hosed again.

<style> /* global paragraph style... */ p { color: green; } </style> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> /* ...overrides the slotted style */ ::slotted(p) { color: red; } </style> <slot></slot> </template> <p>Slotted Element</p> </div>

This is another place where !important could make sense. It even wins if the global style is also set to !important. We could get more defensive and pass the universal selector to ::slotted and set everything back to its initial value so that all slotted content is encapsulated from outside styles leaking in.

<style> /* global paragraph style... */ p { color: green; } </style> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> /* ...can't override this important statement */ ::slotted(*) { all: initial !important; } </style> <slot></slot> </template> <p>Slotted Element</p> </div> Styling :parts

A part is a way of offering up Shadow DOM elements to the parent document for styling. Let’s add a part to a custom element:

<div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <p part="hi">Hi there, I'm a part!</p> </template> </div>

Without the part attribute, there is no way to write styles that reach the paragraph. But with it, the part is exposed as something that can be styled.

<style> ::part(hi) { color: green; } ::part(hi) b { color: green; } /* nope! */ </style> <div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <p part="hi">Hi there, I'm a <b>part</b>!</p> </template> </div>

We can use this to expose specific “parts” of the custom element that are open to outside styling, which is almost like establishing a styling API with specifications for what can and can’t be styled. Just note that ::part cannot be used as part of a complex selector, like a descendant selector:

A bit in the weeds here, but we can export parts in the sense that we can nest elements within elements within elements, and so on. This way, we include parts within elements.

<my-component> <!-- exposes three parts to the nested component --> <nested-component exportparts="part1, part2, part5"></nested-component> </my-component> Styling states and validity

We discussed this when going over element internals in the chapter about the Shadow DOM. But it’s worth revisiting that now that we’re specifically talking about styling. We have a :state pseudo-function that accepts our defined states.

<script> this.internals.states.add("checked"); </script> <style> my-checkbox:state(checked) { /* ... */ } </style>

We also have access to the :invalid pseudo-class.

Cross-barrier custom properties <style> :root { --text-primary: navy; --bg-primary: #abe1e1; --padding: 1.5em 1em; } p { color: var(--text-primary); background: var(--bg-primary); padding: var(--padding); } </style>

Custom properties cross the Shadow DOM barrier!

<my-elem></my-elem> <script> customElements.define('my-elem', class extends HTMLElement { constructor(){ super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = ` <style> p { color: var(--text-primary); background: var(--bg-primary); padding: var(--padding); } </style> <p>Hi there!</p>`; } }) </script> Adding stylesheets to custom elements

There’s the classic ol’ external <link> way of going about it:

<simple-custom> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../assets/external.css"> <p>This one's in the shadow Dom.</p> <slot></slot> </template> <p>Slotted <b>Element</b></p> </simple-custom>

It might seem like an anti-DRY approach to call the same external stylesheet at the top of all web components. To be clear, yes, it is repetitive — but only as far as writing it. Once the sheet has been downloaded once, it is available across the board without any additional requests, so we’re still technically dry in the sense of performance.

CSS imports also work:

<style> @import url("../../assets/external.css"); </style> <simple-custom> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> @import url("../../assets/external.css"); </style> <p>This one's in the shadow Dom.</p> <slot></slot> </template> <p>Slotted <b>Element</b></p> </simple-custom>

One more way using a JavaScript-based approach. It’s probably better to make CSS work without a JavaScript dependency, but it’s still a valid option.

<my-elem></my-elem> <script type="module"> import sheet from '../../assets/external.css' with { type: 'css' }; customElements.define('my-elem', class extends HTMLElement { constructor(){ super(); this.attachShadow({mode: 'open'}); this.shadowRoot.innerHTML = '<p>Hi there</p>'; this.shadowRoot.adoptedStyleSheets = [sheet]; } }) </script>

We have a JavaScript module and import CSS into a string that is then adopted by the shadow root using shadowRoort.adoptedStyleSheets . And since adopted stylesheets are dynamic, we can construct one, share it across multiple instances, and update styles via the CSSOM that ripple across the board to all components that adopt it.

Container queries!

Container queries are nice to pair with components, as custom elements and web components are containers and we can query them and adjust things as the container changes.

<div> <template shadowrootmode="open"> <style> :host { container-type: inline-size; background-color: tan; display: block; padding: 2em; } ul { display: block; list-style: none; margin: 0; } li { padding: .5em; margin: .5em 0; background-color: #fff; } @container (min-width: 50em) { ul { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; gap: 1em; } li { flex: 1 1 auto; } } </style> <ul> <li>First Item</li> <li>Second Item</li> </ul> </template> </div>

In this example, we’re setting styles on the :host() to define a new container, as well as some general styles that are protected and scoped to the shadow root. From there, we introduce a container query that updates the unordered list’s layout when the custom element is at least 50em wide.

Next up…

How web component features are used together!

Chapter 6: HTML-First Patterns

In this chapter, Scott focuses on how other people are using web components in the wild and highlights a few of the more interesting and smart patterns he’s seen.

Let’s start with a typical counter

It’s often the very first example used in React tutorials.

<counter-element></counter-element> <script type="module"> customElements.define('counter-element', class extends HTMLElement { #count = 0; connectedCallback() { this.innerHTML = `<button id="dec">-</button><p id="count">${this.#count}</p><button id="inc">+</button>`; this.addEventListener('click', e => this.update(e) ); } update(e) { if( e.target.nodeName !== 'BUTTON' ) { return } this.#count = e.target.id === 'inc' ? this.#count + 1 : this.#count - 1; this.querySelector('#count').textContent = this.#count; } }); </script> Reef

Reef is a tiny library by Chris Ferdinandi that weighs just 2.6KB minified and zipped yet still provides DOM diffing for reactive state-based UIs like React, which weighs significantly more. An example of how it works in a standalone way:

<div id="greeting"></div> <script type="module"> import {signal, component} from '.../reef.es..min.js'; // Create a signal let data = signal({ greeting: 'Hello', name: 'World' }); component('#greeting', () => `<p>${data.greeting}, ${data.name}!</p>`); </script>

This sets up a “signal” that is basically a live-update object, then calls the component() method to select where we want to make the update, and it injects a template literal in there that passes in the variables with the markup we want.

So, for example, we can update those values on setTimeout:

<div id="greeting"></div> <script type="module"> import {signal, component} from '.../reef.es..min.js'; // Create a signal let data = signal({ greeting: 'Hello', name: 'World' }); component('#greeting', () => `<p>${data.greeting}, ${data.name}!</p>`); setTimeout(() => { data.greeting = '¡Hola' data,name = 'Scott' }, 3000) </script>

We can combine this sort of library with a web component. Here, Scott imports Reef and constructs the data outside the component so that it’s like the application state:

<my-greeting></my-greeting> <script type="module"> import {signal, component} from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/reefjs@13/dist/reef.es.min.js'; window.data = signal({ greeting: 'Hi', name: 'Scott' }); customElements.define('my-greeting', class extends HTMLElement { connectedCallback(){ component(this, () => `<p>${data.greeting}, ${data.name}!</p>` ); } }); </script>

It’s the virtual DOM in a web component! Another approach that is more reactive in the sense that it watches for changes in attributes and then updates the application state in response which, in turn, updates the greeting.

<my-greeting greeting="Hi" name="Scott"></my-greeting> <script type="module"> import {signal, component} from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/reefjs@13/dist/reef.es.min.js'; customElements.define('my-greeting', class extends HTMLElement { static observedAttributes = ["name", "greeting"]; constructor(){ super(); this.data = signal({ greeting: '', name: '' }); } attributeChangedCallback(name, oldValue, newValue) { this.data[name] = newValue; } connectedCallback(){ component(this, () => `<p>${this.data.greeting}, ${this.data.name}!</p>` ); } }); </script>

If the attribute changes, it only changes that instance. The data is registered at the time the component is constructed and we’re only changing string attributes rather than objects with properties.

HTML Web Components

This describes web components that are not empty by default like this:

<my-greeting></my-greeting>

This is a “React” mindset where all the functionality, content, and behavior comes from JavaScript. But Scott reminds us that web components are pretty useful right out of the box without JavaScript. So, “HTML web components” refers to web components that are packed with meaningful content right out of the gate and Scott points to Jeremy Keith’s 2023 article coining the term.

[…] we could call them “HTML web components.” If your custom element is empty, it’s not an HTML web component. But if you’re using a custom element to extend existing markup, that’s an HTML web component.

Jeremy cites something Robin Rendle mused about the distinction:

[…] I’ve started to come around and see Web Components as filling in the blanks of what we can do with hypertext: they’re really just small, reusable chunks of code that extends the language of HTML.

The “React” way:

<UserAvatar src="https://example.com/path/to/img.jpg" alt="..." />

The props look like HTML but they’re not. Instead, the props provide information used to completely swap out the <UserAvatar /> tag with the JavaScript-based markup.

Web components can do that, too:

<user-avatar src="https://example.com/path/to/img.jpg" alt="..." ></user-avatar>

Same deal, real HTML. Progressive enhancement is at the heart of an HTML web component mindset. Here’s how that web component might work:

class UserAvatar extends HTMLElement { connectedCallback() { const src = this.getAttribute("src"); const name = this.getAttribute("name"); this.innerHTML = ` <div> <img src="${src}" alt="Profile photo of ${name}" width="32" height="32" /> <!-- Markup for the tooltip --> </div> `; } } customElements.define('user-avatar', UserAvatar);

But a better starting point would be to include the <img> directly in the component so that the markup is immediately available:

<user-avatar> <img src="https://example.com/path/to/img.jpg" alt="..." /> </user-avatar>

This way, the image is downloaded and ready before JavaScript even loads on the page. Strive for augmentation over replacement!

resizeasaurus

This helps developers test responsive component layouts, particularly ones that use container queries.

<resize-asaurus> Drop any HTML in here to test. </resize-asaurus> <!-- for example: --> <resize-asaurus> <div class="my-responsive-grid"> <div>Cell 1</div> <div>Cell 2</div> <div>Cell 3</div> <!-- ... --> </div> </resize-asaurus> lite-youtube-embed

This is like embedding a YouTube video, but without bringing along all the baggage that YouTube packs into a typical embed snippet.

<lite-youtube videoid="ogYfd705cRs" style="background-image: url(...);"> <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=ogYfd705cRs" class="lyt-playbtn" title="Play Video"> <span class="lyt-visually-hidden">Play Video: Keynote (Google I/O '18)</span> </a> </lite-youtube> <link rel="stylesheet" href="./src.lite-yt-embed.css" /> <script src="./src.lite-yt-embed.js" defer></script>

It starts with a link which is a nice fallback if the video fails to load for whatever reason. When the script runs, the HTML is augmented to include the video <iframe>.

Chapter 7: Web Components Frameworks Tour Lit

Lit extends the base class and then extends what that class provides, but you’re still working directly on top of web components. There are syntax shortcuts for common patterns and a more structured approach.

The package includes all this in about 5-7KB:

• Fast templating
• Reactive properties
• Reactive update lifecycle
• Scoped styles

<simple-greeting name="Geoff"></simple-greeting> <script> import {html, css, LitElement} from 'lit'; export class SimpleGreeting extends LitElement { state styles = css`p { color: blue }`; static properties = { name: {type = String}, }; constructor() { super(); this.name = 'Somebody'; } render() { return html`<p>Hello, ${this.name}!</p>`; } } customElements.define('simple-greeting', SimpleGreeting); </script> ProsConsEcosystemNo official SSR story (but that is changing)CommunityFamiliar ergonomicsLightweightIndustry-proven webc

This is part of the 11ty project. It allows you to define custom elements as files, writing everything as a single file component.

<!-- starting element / index.html --> <my-element></my-element> <!-- ../components/my-element.webc --> <p>This is inside the element</p> <style> /* etc. */ </style> <script> // etc. </script> ProsConsCommunityGeared toward SSGSSG progressive enhancementStill in early stagesSingle file component syntaxZach Leatherman! Enhance

This is Scott’s favorite! It renders web components on the server. Web components can render based on application state per request. It’s a way to use custom elements on the server side. 

ProsConsErgonomicsStill in early stagesProgressive enhancementSingle file component syntaxFull-stack stateful, dynamic SSR components Chapter 8: Web Components Libraries Tour

This is a super short module simply highlighting a few of the more notable libraries for web components that are offered by third parties. Scott is quick to note that all of them are closer in spirit to a React-based approach where custom elements are more like replaced elements with very little meaningful markup to display up-front. That’s not to throw shade at the libraries, but rather to call out that there’s a cost when we require JavaScript to render meaningful content.

Spectrum <sp-button variant="accent" href="components/button"> Use Spectrum Web Component buttons </sp-button>

• This is Adobe’s design system.
• One of the more ambitious projects, as it supports other frameworks like React
• Open source
• Built on Lit

Most components are not exactly HTML-first. The pattern is closer to replaced elements. There’s plenty of complexity, but that makes sense for a system that drives an application like Photoshop and is meant to drop into any project. But still, there is a cost when it comes to delivering meaningful content to users up-front. An all-or-nothing approach like this might be too stark for a small website project.

FAST <fast-checkbox>Checkbox</fast-checkbox>

• This is Microsoft’s system.
• It’s philosophically like Spectrum where there’s very little meaningful HTML up-front.
• Fluent is a library that extends the system for UI components.
• Microsoft Edge rebuilt the browser’s Chrome using these components.

Shoelace <sl-button>Click Me</sl-button>

• Purely meant for third-party developers to use in their projects
• The name is a play on Bootstrap. &#x1f642;
• The markup is mostly a custom element with some text in it rather than a pure HTML-first approach.
• Acquired by Font Awesome and they are creating Web Awesome Components as a new era of Shoelace that is subscription-based

Chapter 9: What’s Next With Web Components

Scott covers what the future holds for web components as far as he is aware.

Declarative custom elements

Define an element in HTML alone that can be used time and again with a simpler syntax. There’s a GitHub issue that explains the idea, and Zach Leatherman has a great write-up as well.

GitHub Issue Cross-root ARIA

Make it easier to pair custom elements with other elements in the Light DOM as well as other custom elements through ARIA.

GitHub Explainer GitHub Proposal Container Queries

How can we use container queries without needing an extra wrapper around the custom element?

HTML Modules

This was one of the web components’ core features but was removed at some point. They can define HTML in an external place that could be used over and over.

GitHub Explainer External styling

This is also known as “open styling.”

GitHub Explainer DOM Parts

This would be a templating feature that allows for JSX-string-literal-like syntax where variables inject data.

<section> <h1 id="name">{name}</h1> Email: <a id="link" href="mailto:{email}">{email}</a> </section>

And the application has produced a template with the following content:

<template> <section> <h1 id="name">{{}}</h1> Email: <a id="link" href="{{}}">{{}}</a> </section> </template> GitHub Proposal Scoped element registries

Using variations of the same web component without name collisions.

GitHub Issue

Web Components Demystified originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Static sites are wonderful. I’m a big fan.

They also have their issues. Namely, static sites either are purely static or the frameworks that generate them completely lose out on true static generation when you just dip your toes in the direction of server routes.

Astro has been watching the front-end ecosystem and is trying to keep one foot firmly embedded in pure static generation, and the other in a powerful set of server-side functionality.

With Astro Actions, Astro brings a lot of the power of the server to a site that is almost entirely static. A good example of this sort of functionality is dealing with search. If you have a content-based site that can be purely generated, adding search is either going to be something handled entirely on the front end, via a software-as-a-service solution, or, in other frameworks, converting your entire site to a server-side application.

With Astro, we can generate most of our site during our build, but have a small bit of server-side code that can handle our search functionality using something like Fuse.js.

In this demo, we’ll use Fuse to search through a set of personal “bookmarks” that are generated at build time, but return proper results from a server call.

GitHub Live Demo Starting the project

To get started, we’ll just set up a very basic Astro project. In your terminal, run the following command:

npm create astro@latest

Astro’s adorable mascot Houston is going to ask you a few questions in your terminal. Here are the basic responses, you’ll need:

• Where should we create your new project? Wherever you’d like, but I’ll be calling my directory ./astro-search
• How would you like to start your new project? Choose the basic minimalist starter.
• Install dependencies? Yes, please!
• Initialize a new git repository? I’d recommend it, personally!

This will create a directory in the location specified and install everything you need to start an Astro project. Open the directory in your code editor of choice and run npm run dev in your terminal in the directory.

When you run your project, you’ll see the default Astro project homepage.

We’re ready to get our project rolling!

Basic setup

To get started, let’s remove the default content from the homepage. Open the  /src/pages/index.astro file.

This is a fairly barebones homepage, but we want it to be even more basic. Remove the <Welcome /> component, and we’ll have a nice blank page.

For styling, let’s add Tailwind and some very basic markup to the homepage to contain our site.

npx astro add tailwind

The astro add command will install Tailwind and attempt to set up all the boilerplate code for you (handy!). The CLI will ask you if you want it to add the various components, I recommend letting it, but if anything fails, you can copy the code needed from each of the steps in the process. As the last step for getting to work with Tailwind, the CLI will tell you to import the styles into a shared layout. Follow those instructions, and we can get to work.

Let’s add some very basic markup to our new homepage.

--- // ./src/pages/index.astro import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro'; --- <Layout> <div class="max-w-3xl mx-auto my-10"> <h1 class="text-3xl text-center">My latest bookmarks</h1> <p class="text-xl text-center mb-5">This is only 10 of A LARGE NUMBER THAT WE'LL CHANGE LATER</p> </div> </Layout>

Your site should now look like this.

Not exactly winning any awards yet! That’s alright. Let’s get our bookmarks loaded in.

Adding bookmark data with Astro Content Layer

Since not everyone runs their own application for bookmarking interesting items, you can borrow my data. Here’s a small subset of my bookmarks, or you can go get 110 items from this link on GitHub. Add this data as a file in your project. I like to group data in a data directory, so my file lives in /src/data/bookmarks.json.

Open code [ { "pageTitle": "Our Favorite Sandwich Bread | King Arthur Baking", "url": "<https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/our-favorite-sandwich-bread-recipe>", "description": "Classic American sandwich loaf, perfect for French toast and sandwiches.", "id": "007y8pmEOvhwldfT3wx1MW" }, { "pageTitle": "Chris Coyier's discussion of Automatic Social Share Images | CSS-Tricks ", "url": "<https://css-tricks.com/automatic-social-share-images/>", "description": "It's a pretty low-effort thing to get a big fancy link preview on social media. Toss a handful of specific <meta> tags on a URL and you get a big image-title-description thing ", "id": "04CXDvGQo19m0oXERL6bhF" }, { "pageTitle": "Automatic Social Share Images | ryanfiller.com", "url": "<https://www.ryanfiller.com/blog/automatic-social-share-images/>", "description": "Setting up automatic social share images with Puppeteer and Netlify Functions. ", "id": "04CXDvGQo19m0oXERLoC10" }, { "pageTitle": "Emma Wedekind: Foundations of Design Systems / React Boston 2019 - YouTube", "url": "<https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pXb2jA43A6k>", "description": "Emma Wedekind: Foundations of Design Systems / React Boston 2019 Presented by: Emma Wedekind – LogMeIn Design systems are in the world around us, from street...", "id": "0d56d03e-aba4-4ebd-9db8-644bcc185e33" }, { "pageTitle": "Editorial Design Patterns With CSS Grid And Named Columns — Smashing Magazine", "url": "<https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/10/editorial-design-patterns-css-grid-subgrid-naming/>", "description": "By naming lines when setting up our CSS Grid layouts, we can tap into some interesting and useful features of Grid — features that become even more powerful when we introduce subgrids.", "id": "13ac1043-1b7d-4a5b-a3d8-b6f5ec34cf1c" }, { "pageTitle": "Netlify pro tip: Using Split Testing to power private beta releases - DEV Community &#x1f469;‍&#x1f4bb;&#x1f468;‍&#x1f4bb;", "url": "<https://dev.to/philhawksworth/netlify-pro-tip-using-split-testing-to-power-private-beta-releases-a7l>", "description": "Giving users ways to opt in and out of your private betas. Video and tutorial.", "id": "1fbabbf9-2952-47f2-9005-25af90b0229e" }, { "pageTitle": "Netlify Public Folder, Part I: What? Recreating the Dropbox Public Folder With Netlify | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog", "url": "<https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2019/netlify-public-folder-part-i-what/>", "id": "2607e651-7b64-4695-8af9-3b9b88d402d5" }, { "pageTitle": "Why Is CSS So Weird? - YouTube", "url": "<https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aHUtMbJw8iA&feature=youtu.be>", "description": "Love it or hate it, CSS is weird! It doesn't work like most programming languages, and it doesn't work like a design tool either. But CSS is also solving a v...", "id": "2e29aa3b-45b8-4ce4-85b7-fd8bc50daccd" }, { "pageTitle": "Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed • The Register", "url": "<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_shambles/>", "id": "33406b33-c453-44d3-8b18-2d2ae83ee73f" }, { "pageTitle": "Netlify Identity for paid subscriptions - Access Control / Identity - Netlify Community", "url": "<https://community.netlify.com/t/netlify-identity-for-paid-subscriptions/1947/2>", "description": "I want to limit certain functionality on my website to paying users. Now I’m using a payment provider (Mollie) similar to Stripe. My idea was to use the webhook fired by this service to call a Netlify function and give…", "id": "34d6341c-18eb-4744-88e1-cfbf6c1cfa6c" }, { "pageTitle": "SmashingConf Freiburg 2019: Videos And Photos — Smashing Magazine", "url": "<https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/10/smashingconf-freiburg-2019/>", "description": "We had a lovely time at SmashingConf Freiburg. This post wraps up the event and also shares the video of all of the Freiburg presentations.", "id": "354cbb34-b24a-47f1-8973-8553ed1d809d" }, { "pageTitle": "Adding Google Calendar to your JAMStack", "url": "<https://www.raymondcamden.com/2019/11/18/adding-google-calendar-to-your-jamstack>", "description": "A look at using Google APIs to add events to your static site.", "id": "361b20c4-75ce-46b3-b6d9-38139e03f2ca" }, { "pageTitle": "How to Contribute to an Open Source Project | CSS-Tricks", "url": "<https://css-tricks.com/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project/>", "description": "The following is going to get slightly opinionated and aims to guide someone on their journey into open source. As a prerequisite, you should have basic", "id": "37300606-af08-4d9a-b5e3-12f64ebbb505" }, { "pageTitle": "Functions | Netlify", "url": "<https://www.netlify.com/docs/functions/>", "description": "Netlify builds, deploys, and hosts your front end. Learn how to get started, see examples, and view documentation for the modern web platform.", "id": "3bf9e31b-5288-4b3b-89f2-97034603dbf6" }, { "pageTitle": "Serverless Can Help You To Focus - By Simona Cotin", "url": "<https://hackernoon.com/serverless-can-do-that-7nw32mk>", "id": "43b1ee63-c2f8-4e14-8700-1e21c2e0a8b1" }, { "pageTitle": "Nuxt, Next, Nest?! My Head Hurts. - DEV Community &#x1f469;‍&#x1f4bb;&#x1f468;‍&#x1f4bb;", "url": "<https://dev.to/laurieontech/nuxt-next-nest-my-head-hurts-5h98>", "description": "I clearly know what all of these things are. Their names are not at all similar. But let's review, just to make sure we know...", "id": "456b7d6d-7efa-408a-9eca-0325d996b69c" }, { "pageTitle": "Consuming a headless CMS GraphQL API with Eleventy - Webstoemp", "url": "<https://www.webstoemp.com/blog/headless-cms-graphql-api-eleventy/>", "description": "With Eleventy, consuming data coming from a GraphQL API to generate static pages is as easy as using Markdown files.", "id": "4606b168-21a6-49df-8536-a2a00750d659" }, ]

Now that the data is in the project, we need for Astro to incorporate the data into its build process. To do this, we can use Astro’s new(ish) Content Layer API. The Content Layer API adds a content configuration file to your src directory that allows you to run and collect any number of content pieces from data in your project or external APIs. Create the file  /src/content.config.ts (the name of this file matters, as this is what Astro is looking for in your project).

import { defineCollection, z } from "astro:content"; import { file } from 'astro/loaders'; const bookmarks = defineCollection({ schema: z.object({ pageTitle: z.string(), url: z.string(), description: z.string().optional() }), loader: file("src/data/bookmarks.json"), }); export const collections = { bookmarks };

In this file, we import a few helpers from Astro. We can use defineCollection to create the collection, z as Zod, to help define our types, and file is a specific content loader meant to read data files.

The defineCollection method takes an object as its argument with a required loader and optional schema. The schema will help make our content type-safe and make sure our data is always what we expect it to be. In this case, we’ll define the three data properties each of our bookmarks has. It’s important to define all your data in your schema, otherwise it won’t be available to your templates.

We provide the loader property with a content loader. In this case, we’ll use the file loader that Astro provides and give it the path to our JSON.

Finally, we need to export the collections variable as an object containing all the collections that we’ve defined (just bookmarks in our project). You’ll want to restart the local server by re-running npm run dev in your terminal to pick up the new data.

Using the new bookmarks content collection

Now that we have data, we can use it in our homepage to show the most recent bookmarks that have been added. To get the data, we need to access the content collection with the getCollection method from astro:content. Add the following code to the frontmatter for ./src/pages/index.astro .

--- import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro'; import { getCollection } from 'astro:content'; const bookmarks = await getCollection('bookmarks'); ---

This code imports the getCollection method and uses it to create a new variable that contains the data in our bookmarkscollection. The bookmarks variable is an array of data, as defined by the collection, which we can use to loop through in our template.

--- import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro'; import { getCollection } from 'astro:content'; const bookmarks = await getCollection('bookmarks'); --- <Layout> <div class="max-w-3xl mx-auto my-10"> <h1 class="text-3xl text-center">My latest bookmarks</h1> <p class="text-xl text-center mb-5"> This is only 10 of {bookmarks.length} </p> <h2 class="text-2xl mb-3">Latest bookmarks</h2> <ul class="grid gap-4"> { bookmarks.slice(0, 10).map((item) => ( <li> <a href={item.data?.url} class="block p-6 bg-white border border-gray-200 rounded-lg shadow-sm hover:bg-gray-100 dark:bg-gray-800 dark:border-gray-700 dark:hover:bg-gray-700"> <h3 class="mb-2 text-2xl font-bold tracking-tight text-gray-900 dark:text-white"> {item.data?.pageTitle} </h3> <p class="font-normal text-gray-700 dark:text-gray-400"> {item.data?.description} </p> </a> </li> )) } </ul> </div> </Layout>

This should pull the most recent 10 items from the array and display them on the homepage with some Tailwind styles. The main thing to note here is that the data structure has changed a little. The actual data for each item in our array actually resides in the data property of the item. This allows Astro to put additional data on the object without colliding with any details we provide in our database. Your project should now look something like this.

Now that we have data and display, let’s get to work on our search functionality.

Building search with actions and vanilla JavaScript

To start, we’ll want to scaffold out a new Astro component. In our example, we’re going to use vanilla JavaScript, but if you’re familiar with React or other frameworks that Astro supports, you can opt for client Islands to build out your search. The Astro actions will work the same.

Setting up the component

We need to make a new component to house a bit of JavaScript and the HTML for the search field and results. Create the component in a ./src/components/Search.astro file.

<form id="searchForm" class="flex mb-6 items-center max-w-sm mx-auto"> <label for="simple-search" class="sr-only">Search</label> <div class="relative w-full"> <input type="text" id="search" class="bg-gray-50 border border-gray-300 text-gray-900 text-sm rounded-lg focus:ring-blue-500 focus:border-blue-500 block w-full p-2.5 dark:bg-gray-700 dark:border-gray-600 dark:placeholder-gray-400 dark:text-white dark:focus:ring-blue-500 dark:focus:border-blue-500" placeholder="Search Bookmarks" required /> </div> <button type="submit" class="p-2.5 ms-2 text-sm font-medium text-white bg-blue-700 rounded-lg border border-blue-700 hover:bg-blue-800 focus:ring-4 focus:outline-none focus:ring-blue-300 dark:bg-blue-600 dark:hover:bg-blue-700 dark:focus:ring-blue-800"> <svg class="w-4 h-4" aria-hidden="true" xmlns="<http://www.w3.org/2000/svg>" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 20 20"> <path stroke="currentColor" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" stroke-width="2" d="m19 19-4-4m0-7A7 7 0 1 1 1 8a7 7 0 0 1 14 0Z"></path> </svg> <span class="sr-only">Search</span> </button> </form> <div class="grid gap-4 mb-10 hidden" id="results"> <h2 class="text-xl font-bold mb-2">Search Results</h2> </div> <script> const form = document.getElementById("searchForm"); const search = document.getElementById("search"); const results = document.getElementById("results"); form?.addEventListener("submit", async (e) => { e.preventDefault(); console.log("SEARCH WILL HAPPEN"); }); </script>

The basic HTML is setting up a search form, input, and results area with IDs that we’ll use in JavaScript. The basic JavaScript finds those elements, and for the form, adds an event listener that fires when the form is submitted. The event listener is where a lot of our magic is going to happen, but for now, a console log will do to make sure everything is set up properly.

Setting up an Astro Action for search

In order for Actions to work, we need our project to allow for Astro to work in server or hybrid mode. These modes allow for all or some pages to be rendered in serverless functions instead of pre-generated as HTML during the build. In this project, this will be used for the Action and nothing else, so we’ll opt for hybrid mode.

To be able to run Astro in this way, we need to add a server integration. Astro has integrations for most of the major cloud providers, as well as a basic Node implementation. I typically host on Netlify, so we’ll install their integration. Much like with Tailwind, we’ll use the CLI to add the package and it will build out the boilerplate we need.

npx astro add netlify

Once this is added, Astro is running in Hybrid mode. Most of our site is pre-generated with HTML, but when the Action gets used, it will run as a serverless function.

Setting up a very basic search Action

Next, we need an Astro Action to handle our search functionality. To create the action, we need to create a new file at ./src/actions/index.js. All our Actions live in this file. You can write the code for each one in separate files and import them into this file, but in this example, we only have one Action, and that feels like premature optimization.

In this file, we’ll set up our search Action. Much like setting up our content collections, we’ll use a method called defineAction and give it a schema and in this case a handler. The schema will validate the data it’s getting from our JavaScript is typed correctly, and the handler will define what happens when the Action runs.

import { defineAction } from "astro:actions"; import { z } from "astro:schema"; import { getCollection } from "astro:content"; export const server = { search: defineAction({ schema: z.object({ query: z.string(), }), handler: async (query) => { const bookmarks = await getCollection("bookmarks"); const results = await bookmarks.filter((bookmark) => { return bookmark.data.pageTitle.includes(query); }); return results; }, }), };

For our Action, we’ll name it search and expect a schema of an object with a single property named query which is a string. The handler function will get all of our bookmarks from the content collection and use a native JavaScript .filter() method to check if the query is included in any bookmark titles. This basic functionality is ready to test with our front-end.

Using the Astro Action in the search form event

When the user submits the form, we need to send the query to our new Action. Instead of figuring out where to send our fetch request, Astro gives us access to all of our server Actions with the actions object in astro:actions. This means that any Action we create is accessible from our client-side JavaScript.

In our Search component, we can now import our Action directly into the JavaScript and then use the search action when the user submits the form.

<script> import { actions } from "astro:actions"; const form = document.getElementById("searchForm"); const search = document.getElementById("search"); const results = document.getElementById("results"); form?.addEventListener("submit", async (e) => { e.preventDefault(); results.innerHTML = ""; const query = search.value; const { data, error } = await actions.search(query); if (error) { results.innerHTML = `<p>${error.message}</p>`; return; } // create a div for each search result data.forEach(( item ) => { const div = document.createElement("div"); div.innerHTML = ` <a href="${item.data?.url}" class="block p-6 bg-white border border-gray-200 rounded-lg shadow-sm hover:bg-gray-100 dark:bg-gray-800 dark:border-gray-700 dark:hover:bg-gray-700"> <h3 class="mb-2 text-2xl font-bold tracking-tight text-gray-900 dark:text-white"> ${item.data?.pageTitle} </h3> <p class="font-normal text-gray-700 dark:text-gray-400"> ${item.data?.description} </p> </a>`; // append the div to the results container results.appendChild(div); }); // show the results container results.classList.remove("hidden"); }); </script>

When results are returned, we can now get search results!

Though, they’re highly problematic. This is just a simple JavaScript filter, after all. You can search for “Favorite” and get my favorite bread recipe, but if you search for “favorite” (no caps), you’ll get an error… Not ideal.

That’s why we should use a package like Fuse.js.

Adding Fuse.js for fuzzy search

Fuse.js is a JavaScript package that has utilities to make “fuzzy” search much easier for developers. Fuse will accept a string and based on a number of criteria (and a number of sets of data) provide responses that closely match even when the match isn’t perfect. Depending on the settings, Fuse can match “Favorite”, “favorite”, and even misspellings like “favrite” all to the right results.

Is Fuse as powerful as something like Algolia or ElasticSearch? No. Is it free and pretty darned good? Absolutely! To get Fuse moving, we need to install it into our project.

npm install fuse.js

From there, we can use it in our Action by importing it in the file and creating a new instance of Fuse based on our bookmarks collection.

import { defineAction } from "astro:actions"; import { z } from "astro:schema"; import { getCollection } from "astro:content"; import Fuse from "fuse.js"; export const server = { search: defineAction({ schema: z.object({ query: z.string(), }), handler: async (query) => { const bookmarks = await getCollection("bookmarks"); const fuse = new Fuse(bookmarks, { threshold: 0.3, keys: [ { name: "data.pageTitle", weight: 1.0 }, { name: "data.description", weight: 0.7 }, { name: "data.url", weight: 0.3 }, ], }); const results = await fuse.search(query); return results; }, }), };

In this case, we create the Fuse instance with a few options. We give it a threshold value between 0 and 1 to decide how “fuzzy” to make the search. Fuzziness is definitely something that depends on use case and the dataset. In our dataset, I’ve found 0.3 to be a great threshold.

The keys array allows you to specify which data should be searched. In this case, I want all the data to be searched, but I want to allow for different weighting for each item. The title should be most important, followed by the description, and the URL should be last. This way, I can search for keywords in all these areas.

Once there’s a new Fuse instance, we run fuse.search(query) to have Fuse check the data, and return an array of results.

When we run this with our front-end, we find we have one more issue to tackle.

The structure of the data returned is not quite what it was with our simple JavaScript. Each result now has a refIndex and an item. All our data lives on the item, so we need to destructure the item off of each returned result.

To do that, adjust the front-end forEach.

// create a div for each search result data.forEach(({ item }) => { const div = document.createElement("div"); div.innerHTML = ` <a href="${item.data?.url}" class="block p-6 bg-white border border-gray-200 rounded-lg shadow-sm hover:bg-gray-100 dark:bg-gray-800 dark:border-gray-700 dark:hover:bg-gray-700"> <h3 class="mb-2 text-2xl font-bold tracking-tight text-gray-900 dark:text-white"> ${item.data?.pageTitle} </h3> <p class="font-normal text-gray-700 dark:text-gray-400"> ${item.data?.description} </p> </a>`; // append the div to the results container results.appendChild(div); });

Now, we have a fully working search for our bookmarks.

Next steps

This just scratches the surface of what you can do with Astro Actions. For instance, we should probably add additional error handling based on the error we get back. You can also experiment with handling this at the page-level and letting there be a Search page where the Action is used as a form action and handles it all as a server request instead of with front-end JavaScript code. You could also refactor the JavaScript from the admittedly low-tech vanilla JS to something a bit more robust with React, Svelte, or Vue.

One thing is for sure, Astro keeps looking at the front-end landscape and learning from the mistakes and best practices of all the other frameworks. Actions, Content Layer, and more are just the beginning for a truly compelling front-end framework.

Powering Search With Astro Actions and Fuse.js originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

The videos from Smashing Magazine’s recent event on accessibility were just posted the other day. I was invited to host the panel discussion with the speakers, including a couple of personal heroes of mine, Stéphanie Walter and Sarah Fossheim. But I was just as stoked to meet Kardo Ayoub who shared his deeply personal story as a designer with a major visual impairment.

I’ll drop the video here:

I’ll be the first to admit that I had to hold back my emotions as Kardo detailed what led to his impairment, the shock that came of it, and how he has beaten the odds to not only be an effective designer, but a real leader in the industry. It’s well worth watching his full presentation, which is also available on YouTube alongside the full presentations from Stéphanie and Sarah.

Smashing Meets Accessibility originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

In the last article, we created a CSS-only star rating component using the CSS mask and border-image properties, as well as the newly enhanced attr() function. We ended with CSS code that we can easily adjust to create component variations, including a heart rating and volume control.

This second article will study a different approach that gives us more flexibility. Instead of the border-image trick we used in the first article, we will rely on scroll-driven animations!

Here is the same star rating component with the new implementation. And since we’re treading in experimental territory, you’ll want to view this in Chrome 115+ while we wait for Safari and Firefox support:

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Do you spot the difference between this and the final demo in the first article? This time, I am updating the color of the stars based on how many of them are selected — something we cannot do using the border-image trick!

I highly recommend you read the first article before jumping into this second part if you missed it, as I will be referring to concepts and techniques that we explored over there.

One more time: At the time of writing, only Chrome 115+ and Edge 115+ fully support the features we will be using in this article, so please use either one of those as you follow along.

Why scroll-driven animations?

You might be wondering why we’re talking about scroll-driven animation when there’s nothing to scroll to in the star rating component. Scrolling? Animation? It’s even more confusing when you read the MDN explainer for scroll-driven animations:

It allows you to animate property values based on a progression along a scroll-based timeline instead of the default time-based document timeline. This means that you can animate an element by scrolling a scrollable element, rather than just by the passing of time.

But if you keep reading you will see that we have two types of scroll-based timelines: scroll progress timelines and view progress timelines. In our case, we are going to use the second one; a view progress timeline, and here is how MDN describes it:

You progress this timeline based on the change in visibility of an element (known as the subject) inside a scroller. The visibility of the subject inside the scroller is tracked as a percentage of progress — by default, the timeline is at 0% when the subject is first visible at one edge of the scroller, and 100% when it reaches the opposite edge.

You can check out the CSS-Tricks almanac definition for view-timeline-name while you’re at it for another explanation.

Things start to make more sense if we consider the thumb element as the subject and the input element as the scroller. After all, the thumb moves within the input area, so its visibility changes. We can track that movement as a percentage of progress and convert it to a value we can use to style the input element. We are essentially going to implement the equivalent of document.querySelector("input").value in JavaScript but with vanilla CSS!

The implementation

Now that we have an idea of how this works, let’s see how everything translates into code.

@property --val { syntax: "<number>"; inherits: true; initial-value: 0; } input[type="range"] { --min: attr(min type(<number>)); --max: attr(max type(<number>)); timeline-scope: --val; animation: --val linear both; animation-timeline: --val; animation-range: entry 100% exit 0%; overflow: hidden; } @keyframes --val { 0% { --val: var(--max) } 100% { --val: var(--min) } } input[type="range"]::thumb { view-timeline: --val inline; }

I know, this is a lot of strange syntax! But we will dissect each line and you will see that it’s not all that complex at the end of the day.

The subject and the scroller

We start by defining the subject, i.e. the thumb element, and for this we use the view-timeline shorthand property. From the MDN page, we can read:

The view-timeline CSS shorthand property is used to define a named view progress timeline, which is progressed through based on the change in visibility of an element (known as the subject) inside a scrollable element (scroller). view-timeline is set on the subject.

I think it’s self-explanatory. The view timeline name is --val and the axis is inline since we’re working along the horizontal x-axis.

Next, we define the scroller, i.e. the input element, and for this, we use overflow: hidden (or overflow: auto). This part is the easiest but also the one you will forget the most so let me insist on this: don’t forget to define overflow on the scroller!

I insist on this because your code will work fine without defining overflow, but the values won’t be good. The reason is that the scroller exists but will be defined by the browser (depending on your page structure and your CSS) and most of the time it’s not the one you want. So let me repeat it another time: remember the overflow property!

The animation

Next up, we create an animation that animates the --val variable between the input’s min and max values. Like we did in the first article, we are using the newly-enhanced attr() function to get those values. See that? The “animation” part of the scroll-driven animation, an animation we link to the view timeline we defined on the subject using animation-timeline. And to be able to animate a variable we register it using @property.

Note the use of timeline-scope which is another tricky feature that’s easy to overlook. By default, named view timelines are scoped to the element where they are defined and its descendant. In our case, the input is a parent element of the thumb so it cannot access the named view timeline. To overcome this, we increase the scope using timeline-scope. Again, from MDN:

timeline-scope is given the name of a timeline defined on a descendant element; this causes the scope of the timeline to be increased to the element that timeline-scope is set on and any of its descendants. In other words, that element and any of its descendant elements can now be controlled using that timeline.

Never forget about this! Sometimes everything is correctly defined but nothing is working because you forget about the scope.

There’s something else you might be wondering:

Why are the keyframes values inverted? Why is the min is set to 100% and the max set to 0%?

To understand this, let’s first take the following example where you can scroll the container horizontally to reveal a red circle inside of it.

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Initially, the red circle is hidden on the right side. Once we start scrolling, it appears from the right side, then disappears to the left as you continue scrolling towards the right. We scroll from left to right but our actual movement is from right to left.

In our case, we don’t have any scrolling since our subject (the thumb) will not overflow the scroller (the input) but the main logic is the same. The starting point is the right side and the ending point is the left side. In other words, the animation starts when the thumb is on the right side (the input’s max value) and will end when it’s on the left side (the input’s min value).

The animation range

The last piece of the puzzle is the following important line of code:

animation-range: entry 100% exit 0%;

By default, the animation starts when the subject starts to enter the scroller from the right and ends when the subject has completely exited the scroller from the left. This is not good because, as we said, the thumb will not overflow the scroller, so it will never reach the start and the end of the animation.

To rectify this we use the animation-range property to make the start of the animation when the subject has completely entered the scroller from the right (entry 100%) and the end of the animation when the subject starts to exit the scroller from the left (exit 0%).

To summarize, the thumb element will move within input’s area and that movement is used to control the progress of an animation that animates a variable between the input’s min and max attribute values. We have our replacement for document.querySelector("input").value in JavaScript!

What’s going on with all the --val instances everywhere? Is it the same thing each time?

I am deliberately using the same --val everywhere to confuse you a little and push you to try to understand what is going on. We usually use the dashed ident (--) notation to define custom properties (also called CSS variables) that we later call with var(). This is still true but that same notation can be used to name other things as well.

In our examples we have three different things named --val:

1. The variable that is animated and registered using @property. It contains the selected value and is used to style the input.
2. The named view timeline defined by view-timeline and used by animation-timeline.
3. The keyframes named --val and called by animation.

Here is the same code written with different names for more clarity:

@property --val { syntax: "<number>"; inherits: true; initial-value: 0; } input[type="range"] { --min: attr(min type(<number>)); --max: attr(max type(<number>)); timeline-scope: --timeline; animation: value_update linear both; animation-timeline: --timeline; animation-range: entry 100% exit 0%; overflow: hidden; } @keyframes value_update { 0% { --val: var(--max) } 100% { --val: var(--min) } } input[type="range"]::thumb { view-timeline: --timeine inline; } The star rating component

All that we have done up to now is get the selected value of the input range — which is honestly about 90% of the work we need to do. What remains is some basic styles and code taken from what we made in the first article.

If we omit the code from the previous section and the code from the previous article here is what we are left with:

input[type="range"] { background: linear-gradient(90deg, hsl(calc(30 + 4 * var(--val)) 100% 56%) calc(var(--val) * 100% / var(--max)), #7b7b7b 0 ); } input[type="range"]::thumb { opacity: 0; }

We make the thumb invisible and we define a gradient on the main element to color in the stars. No surprise here, but the gradient uses the same --val variable that contains the selected value to inform how much is colored in.

When, for example, you select three stars, the --val variable will equal 3 and the color stop of the first color will equal 3*100%/5 , or 60%, meaning three stars are colored in. That same color is also dynamic as I am using the hsl() function where the first argument (the hue) is a function of --val as well.

Here is the full demo, which you will want to open in Chrome 115+ at the time I’m writing this:

CodePen Embed Fallback

And guess what? This implementation works with half stars as well without the need to change the CSS. All you have to do is update the input’s attributes to work in half increments.

<input type="range" min=".5" step=".5" max="5"> CodePen Embed Fallback

That’s it! We have our rating star component that you can easily control by adjusting the attributes.

So, should I use border-image or a scroll-driven animation?

If we look past the browser support factor, I consider this version better than the border-image approach we used in the first article. The border-image version is simpler and does the job pretty well, but it’s limited in what it can do. While our goal is to create a star rating component, it’s good to be able to do more and be able to style an input range as you want.

With scroll-driven animations, we have more flexibility since the idea is to first get the value of the input and then use it to style the element. I know it’s not easy to grasp but don’t worry about that. You will face scroll-driven animations more often in the future and it will become more familiar with time. This example will look easy to you in good time.

Worth noting, that the code used to get the value is a generic code that you can easily reuse even if you are not going to style the input itself. Getting the value of the input is independent of styling it.

Here is a demo where I am adding a tooltip to a range slider to show its value:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Many techniques are involved to create that demo and one of them is using scroll-driven animations to get the input value and show it inside the tooltip!

Here is another demo using the same technique where different range sliders are controlling different variables on the page.

CodePen Embed Fallback

And why not a wavy range slider?

CodePen Embed Fallback

This one is a bit crazy but it illustrates how far we go with styling an input range! So, even if your goal is not to create a star rating component, there are a lot of use cases where such a technique can be really useful.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this brief two-part series. In addition to a star rating component made with minimal code, we have explored a lot of cool and modern features, including the attr() function, CSS mask, and scroll-driven animations. It’s still early to adopt all of these features in production because of browser support, but it’s a good time to explore them and see what can be done soon using only CSS.

Article series

1. A CSS-Only Star Rating Component and More! (Part 1)
2. A CSS-Only Star Rating Component and More! (Part 2)

A CSS-Only Star Rating Component and More! (Part 2) originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Grouping selected items is a design choice often employed to help users quickly grasp which items are selected and unselected. For instance, checked-off items move up the list in to-do lists, allowing users to focus on the remaining tasks when they revisit the list.

We’ll design a UI that follows a similar grouping pattern. Instead of simply rearranging the list of selected items, we’ll also lay them out horizontally using CSS Grid. This further distinguishes between the selected and unselected items.

We’ll explore two approaches for this. One involves using auto-fill, which is suitable when the selected items don’t exceed the grid container’s boundaries, ensuring a stable layout. In contrast, CSS Grid’s span keyword provides another approach that offers greater flexibility.

The HTML is the same for both methods:

<ul> <li> <label> <input type="checkbox" /> <div class=icon>&#x1F371;</div> <div class=text>Bento</div> </label> </li> <li> <label> <input type="checkbox" /> <div class=icon>&#x1F361;</div> <div class=text>Dangos</div> </label> </li> <!-- more list items --> </ul>

The markup consists of an unordered list (<ul>). However, we don’t necessarily have to use <ul> and <li> elements since the layout of the items will be determined by the CSS grid properties. Note that I am using an implicit <label> around the <input> elements mostly as a way to avoid needing an extra wrapper around things, but that explicit labels are generally better supported by assistive technologies.

Method 1: Using auto-fill CodePen Embed Fallback ul { width: 250px; display: grid; gap: 14px 10px; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, 40px); justify-content: center; /* etc. */ }

The <ul> element, which contains the items, has a display: grid style rule, turning it into a grid container. It also has gaps of 14px and 10px between its grid rows and columns. The grid content is justified (inline alignment) to center.

The grid-template-columns property specifies how column tracks will be sized in the grid. Initially, all items will be in a single column. However, when items are selected, they will be moved to the first row, and each selected item will be in its own column. The key part of this declaration is the auto-fill value.

The auto-fill value is added where the repeat count goes in the repeat() function. This ensures the columns repeat, with each column’s track sizing being the given size in repeat() (40px in our example), that will fit inside the grid container’s boundaries.

For now, let’s make sure that the list items are positioned in a single column:

li { width: inherit; grid-column: 1; /* Equivalent to: grid-column-start: 1; grid-column-end: auto; */ /* etc. */ }

When an item is checked, that is when an <li> element :has() a :checked checkbox, we’re selecting that. And when we do, the <li> is given a grid-area that puts it in the first row, and its column will be auto-placed within the grid in the first row as per the value of the grid-template-columns property of the grid container (<ul>). This causes the selected items to group at the top of the list and be arranged horizontally:

li { width: inherit; grid-column: 1; /* etc. */ &:has(:checked) { grid-area: 1; /* Equivalent to: grid-row-start: 1; grid-column-start: auto; grid-row-end: auto; grid-column-end: auto; */ width: 40px; /* etc. */ } /* etc. */ }

And that gives us our final result! Let’s compare that with the second method I want to show you.

Method 2: Using the span keyword CodePen Embed Fallback

We won’t be needing the grid-template-columns property now. Here’s the new <ul> style ruleset:

ul { width: 250px; display: grid; gap: 14px 10px; justify-content: center; justify-items: center; /* etc. */ }

The inclusion of justify-items will help with the alignment of grid items as we’ll see in a moment. Here are the updated styles for the <li> element:

li { width: inherit; grid-column: 1 / span 6; /* Equivalent to: grid-column-start: 1; grid-column-end: span 6; */ /* etc. */ }

As before, each item is placed in the first column, but now they also span six column tracks (since there are six items). This ensures that when multiple columns appear in the grid, as items are selected, the following unselected items remain in a single column under the selected items — now the unselected items span across multiple column tracks. The justify-items: center declaration will keep the items aligned to the center.

li { width: inherit; grid-column: 1 / span 6; /* etc. */ &:has(:checked) { grid-area: 1; width: 120px; /* etc. */ } /* etc. */ }

The width of the selected items has been increased from the previous example, so the layout of the selection UI can be viewed for when the selected items overflow the container.

Selection order

The order of selected and unselected items will remain the same as the source order. If the on-screen order needs to match the user’s selection, dynamically assign an incremental order value to the items as they are selected.

onload = ()=>{ let i=1; document.querySelectorAll('input').forEach((input)=>{ input.addEventListener("click", () => { input.parentElement.parentElement.style.order = input.checked ? i++ : (i--, 0); }); }); } CodePen Embed Fallback Wrapping up

CSS Grid helps make both approaches very flexible without a ton of configuration. By using auto-fill to place items on either axis (rows or columns), the selected items can be easily grouped within the grid container without disturbing the layout of the unselected items in the same container, for as long as the selected items don’t overflow the container.

If they do overflow the container, using the span approach helps maintain the layout irrespective of how long the group of selected items gets in a given axis. Some design alternatives for the UI are grouping the selected items at the end of the list, or swapping the horizontal and vertical structure.

Grouping Selection List Items Together With CSS Grid originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Creating a star rating component is a classic exercise in web development. It has been done and re-done many times using different techniques. We usually need a small amount of JavaScript to pull it together, but what about a CSS-only implementation? Yes, it is possible!

Here is a demo of a CSS-only star rating component. You can click to update the rating.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Cool, right? In addition to being CSS-only, the HTML code is nothing but a single element:

<input type="range" min="1" max="5">

An input range element is the perfect candidate here since it allows a user to select a numeric value between two boundaries (the min and max). Our goal is to style that native element and transform it into a star rating component without additional markup or any script! We will also create more components at the end, so follow along.

Note: This article will only focus on the CSS part. While I try my best to consider UI, UX, and accessibility aspects, my component is not perfect. It may have some drawbacks (bugs, accessibility issues, etc), so please use it with caution.

The <input> element

You probably know it but styling native elements such as inputs is a bit tricky due to all the default browser styles and also the different internal structures. If, for example, you inspect the code of an input range you will see a different HTML between Chrome (or Safari, or Edge) and Firefox.

Luckily, we have some common parts that I will rely on. I will target two different elements: the main element (the input itself) and the thumb element (the one you slide with your mouse to update the value).

Our CSS will mainly look like this:

input[type="range"] { /* styling the main element */ } input[type="range" i]::-webkit-slider-thumb { /* styling the thumb for Chrome, Safari and Edge */ } input[type="range"]::-moz-range-thumb { /* styling the thumb for Firefox */ }

The only drawback is that we need to repeat the styles of the thumb element twice. Don’t try to do the following:

input[type="range" i]::-webkit-slider-thumb, input[type="range"]::-moz-range-thumb { /* styling the thumb */ }

This doesn’t work because the whole selector is invalid. Chrome & Co. don’t understand the ::-moz-* part and Firefox doesn’t understand the ::-webkit-* part. For the sake of simplicity, I will use the following selector for this article:

input[type="range"]::thumb { /* styling the thumb */ }

But the demo contains the real selectors with the duplicated styles. Enough introduction, let’s start coding!

Styling the main element (the star shape)

We start by defining the size:

input[type="range"] { --s: 100px; /* control the size*/ height: var(--s); aspect-ratio: 5; appearance: none; /* remove the default browser styles */ }

If we consider that each star is placed within a square area, then for a 5-star rating we need a width equal to five times the height, hence the use of aspect-ratio: 5.

CodePen Embed Fallback

That 5 value is also the value defined as the max attribute for the input element.

<input type="range" min="1" max="5">

So, we can rely on the newly enhanced attr() function (Chrome-only at the moment) to read that value instead of manually defining it!

input[type="range"] { --s: 100px; /* control the size*/ height: var(--s); aspect-ratio: attr(max type(<number>)); appearance: none; /* remove the default browser styles */ }

Now you can control the number of stars by simply adjusting the max attribute. This is great because the max attribute is also used by the browser internally, so updating that value will control our implementation as well as the browser’s behavior.

This enhanced version of attr() is only available in Chrome for now so all my demos will contain a fallback to help with unsupported browsers.

The next step is to use a CSS mask to create the stars. We need the shape to repeat five times (or more depending on the max value) so the mask size should be equal to var(--s) var(--s) or var(--s) 100% or simply var(--s) since by default the height will be equal to 100%.

input[type="range"] { --s: 100px; /* control the size*/ height: var(--s); aspect-ratio: attr(max type(<number>)); appearance: none; /* remove the default browser styles */ mask-image: /* ... */; mask-size: var(--s); }

What about the mask-image property you might ask? I think it’s no surprise that I tell you it will require a few gradients, but it could also be SVG instead. This article is about creating a star-rating component but I would like to keep the star part kind of generic so you can easily replace it with any shape you want. That’s why I say “and more” in the title of this post. We will see later how using the same code structure we can get a variety of different variations.

Here is a demo showing two different implementations for the star. One is using gradients and the other is using an SVG.

CodePen Embed Fallback

In this case, the SVG implementation looks cleaner and the code is also shorter but keep both approaches in your back pocket because a gradient implementation can do a better job in some situations.

Styling the thumb (the selected value)

Let’s now focus on the thumb element. Take the last demo then click the stars and notice the position of the thumb.

CodePen Embed Fallback

The good thing is that the thumb is always within the area of a given star for all the values (from min to max), but the position is different for each star. It would be good if the position is always the same, regardless of the value. Ideally, the thumb should always be at the center of the stars for consistency.

Here is a figure to illustrate the position and how to update it.

The lines are the position of the thumb for each value. On the left, we have the default positions where the thumb goes from the left edge to the right edge of the main element. On the right, if we restrict the position of the thumb to a smaller area by adding some spaces on the sides, we get much better alignment. That space is equal to half the size of one star, or var(--s)/2. We can use padding for this:

input[type="range"] { --s: 100px; /* control the size */ height: var(--s); aspect-ratio: attr(max type(<number>)); padding-inline: calc(var(--s) / 2); box-sizing: border-box; appearance: none; /* remove the default browser styles */ mask-image: ...; mask-size: var(--s); } CodePen Embed Fallback

It’s better but not perfect because I am not accounting for the thumb size, which means we don’t have true centering. It’s not an issue because I will make the size of the thumb very small with a width equal to 1px.

input[type="range"]::thumb { width: 1px; height: var(--s); appearance: none; /* remove the default browser styles */ } CodePen Embed Fallback

The thumb is now a thin line placed at the center of the stars. I am using a red color to highlight the position but in reality, I don’t need any color because it will be transparent.

You may think we are still far from the final result but we are almost done! One property is missing to complete the puzzle: border-image.

The border-image property allows us to draw decorations outside an element thanks to its outset feature. For this reason, I made the thumb small and transparent. The coloration will be done using border-image. I will use a gradient with two solid colors as the source:

linear-gradient(90deg, gold 50%, grey 0);

And we write the following:

border-image: linear-gradient(90deg, gold 50%, grey 0) fill 0 // 0 100px;

The above means that we extend the area of the border-image from each side of the element by 100px and the gradient will fill that area. In other words, each color of the gradient will cover half of that area, which is 100px.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Do you see the logic? We created a kind of overflowing coloration on each side of the thumb — a coloration that will logically follow the thumb so each time you click a star it slides into place!

Now instead of 100px let’s use a very big value:

CodePen Embed Fallback

We are getting close! The coloration is filling all the stars but we don’t want it to be in the middle but rather across the entire selected star. For this, we update the gradient a bit and instead of using 50%, we use 50% + var(--s)/2. We add an offset equal to half the width of a star which means the first color will take more space and our star rating component is perfect!

CodePen Embed Fallback

We can still optimize the code a little where instead of defining a height for the thumb, we keep it 0 and we consider the vertical outset of border-image to spread the coloration.

input[type="range"]::thumb{ width: 1px; border-image: linear-gradient(90deg, gold calc(50% + var(--s) / 2), grey 0) fill 0 // var(--s) 500px; appearance: none; }

We can also write the gradient differently using a conic gradient instead:

input[type="range"]::thumb{ width: 1px; border-image: conic-gradient(at calc(50% + var(--s) / 2), grey 50%, gold 0) fill 0 // var(--s) 500px; appearance: none; }

I know that the syntax of border-image is not easy to grasp and I went a bit fast with the explanation. But I have a very detailed article over at Smashing Magazine where I dissect that property with a lot of examples that I invite you to read for a deeper dive into how the property works.

The full code of our component is this:

<input type="range" min="1" max="5"> input[type="range"] { --s: 100px; /* control the size*/ height: var(--s); aspect-ratio: attr(max type(<number>)); padding-inline: calc(var(--s) / 2); box-sizing: border-box; appearance: none; mask-image: /* ... */; /* either an SVG or gradients */ mask-size: var(--s); } input[type="range"]::thumb { width: 1px; border-image: conic-gradient(at calc(50% + var(--s) / 2), grey 50%, gold 0) fill 0//var(--s) 500px; appearance: none; }

That’s all! A few lines of CSS code and we have a nice rating star component!

Half-Star Rating

What about having a granularity of half a star as a rating? It’s something common and we can do it with the previous code by making a few adjustments.

First, we update the input element to increment in half steps instead of full steps:

<input type="range" min=".5" step=".5" max="5">

By default, the step is equal to 1 but we can update it to .5 (or any value) then we update the min value to .5 as well. On the CSS side, we change the padding from var(--s)/2 to var(--s)/4, and we do the same for the offset inside the gradient.

input[type="range"] { --s: 100px; /* control the size*/ height: var(--s); aspect-ratio: attr(max type(<number>)); padding-inline: calc(var(--s) / 4); box-sizing: border-box; appearance: none; mask-image: ...; /* either SVG or gradients */ mask-size: var(--s); } input[type="range"]::thumb{ width: 1px; border-image: conic-gradient(at calc(50% + var(--s) / 4),grey 50%, gold 0) fill 0 // var(--s) 500px; appearance: none; }

The difference between the two implementations is a factor of one-half which is also the step value. That means we can use attr() and create a generic code that works for both cases.

input[type="range"] { --s: 100px; /* control the size*/ --_s: calc(attr(step type(<number>),1) * var(--s) / 2); height: var(--s); aspect-ratio: attr(max type(<number>)); padding-inline: var(--_s); box-sizing: border-box; appearance: none; mask-image: ...; /* either an SVG or gradients */ mask-size: var(--s); } input[type="range"]::thumb{ width: 1px; border-image: conic-gradient(at calc(50% + var(--_s)),gold 50%,grey 0) fill 0//var(--s) 500px; appearance: none; }

Here is a demo where modifying the step is all that you need to do to control the granularity. Don’t forget that you can also control the number of stars using the max attribute.

CodePen Embed Fallback Using the keyboard to adjust the rating

As you may know, we can adjust the value of an input range slider using a keyboard, so we can control the rating using the keyboard as well. That’s a good thing but there is a caveat. Due to the use of the mask property, we no longer have the default outline that indicates keyboard focus which is an accessibility concern for those who rely on keyboard input.

For a better user experience and to make the component more accessible, it’s good to display an outline on focus. The easiest solution is to add an extra wrapper:

<span> <input type="range" min="1" max="5"> </span>

That will have an outline when the input inside has focus:

span:has(:focus-visible) { outline: 2px solid; }

Try to use your keyboard in the below example to adjust both ratings:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Another idea is to consider a more complex mask configuration that keeps a small area around the element visible to show the outline:

mask: /* ... */ 0/var(--s), conic-gradient(from 90deg at 2px 2px,#0000 25%,#000 0) 0 0/calc(100% - 2px) calc(100% - 2px);

I prefer using this last method because it maintains the single-element implementation but maybe your HTML structure allows you to add focus on an upper element and you can keep the mask configuration simple. It totally depends!

CodePen Embed Fallback More examples!

As I said earlier, what we are making is more than a star rating component. You can easily update the mask value to use any shape you want.

Here is an example where I am using an SVG of a heart instead of a star.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Why not butterflies?

CodePen Embed Fallback

This time I am using a PNG image as a mask. If you are not comfortable using SVG or gradients you can use a transparent image instead. As long as you have an SVG, a PNG, or gradients, there is no limit on what you can do with this as far as shapes go.

We can go even further into the customization and create a volume control component like below:

CodePen Embed Fallback

I am not repeating a specific shape in that last example, but am using a complex mask configuration to create a signal shape.

Conclusion

We started with a star rating component and ended with a bunch of cool examples. The title could have been “How to style an input range element” because this is what we did. We upgraded a native component without any script or extra markup, and with only a few lines of CSS.

What about you? Can you think about another fancy component using the same code structure? Share your example in the comment section!

Article series

1. A CSS-Only Star Rating Component and More! (Part 1)
2. A CSS-Only Star Rating Component and More! (Part 2)

A CSS-Only Star Rating Component and More! (Part 1) originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

In his AI Speaker Series presentation at Sutter Hill Ventures, Brian Hie presented Evo, a long-context genomic foundation model, and discussed how it's being used to understand and design biological systems. Here's my notes from his talk:

• Biology is speaking a foreign language in DNA, RNA, and protein sequences.
• While we've made tremendous advances in DNA sequencing, synthesis, and genome editing, intelligently composing new DNA sequences remains a fundamental challenge.
• Similar to how language models like ChatGPT use next-token prediction to learn complex patterns in text, genomic models can use next-base-pair prediction to uncover patterns in DNA.
• Evolution leaves its imprint on DNA sequences, allowing models to learn complex biological mechanisms from sequence variation.
• Protein language models have already shown they can learn evolutionary rules and information about protein structure. Evo takes this further by training on raw DNA sequences across all domains of life.
• Evo 1 was trained on prokaryotic genomes with 7 billion parameters and a 131,000 token context.
• The model demonstrated a zero-shot understanding of gene essentiality, accurately predicting which genes are more tolerant of mutations.
• It can also design new biological systems that have comparable performance to state-of-the-art systems but with substantially different sequences.

• Evo 2 expanded to all three domains of life, trained on 9.3 trillion tokens with 40 billion parameters and a one million base pair context length. This makes it the largest model by compute ever trained in biology.
• The longer context allows it to understand information from the molecular level up to complete bacterial genomes or yeast chromosomes.
• Evo 2 excels at predicting the effects of mutations on human genes, particularly in non-coding regions where current models struggle. When fine-tuned on known breast cancer mutations, it achieves state-of-the-art performance.
• Using sparse autoencoders, researchers can interpret the model and find features that correspond to biologically relevant concepts like DNA, RNA, and protein structures. Some features even detect errors in genetic code, similar to how language models can detect bugs in computer code.
• The most forward-looking application is designing at the scale of entire genomes or chromosomes. Evo 2 can generate coherent mitochondrial genomes with all the right components and predicted structures.
• It can also control chromatin accessibility patterns, writing messages in "Morse code" by specifying open and closed regions of chromatin.
• All of the models, code, and datasets have been released as open source for the scientific community.

You can find the <details> element all over the web these days. We were excited about it when it first dropped and toyed with using it as a menu back in 2019 (but probably don’t) among many other experiments. John Rhea made an entire game that combines <details> with the Popover API!

Now that we’re 5+ years into <details>, we know more about it than ever before. I thought I’d round that information up so it’s in one place I can reference in the future without having to search the site — and other sites — to find it.

The basic markup

It’s a single element:

<details> Open and close the element to toggle this content. </details> CodePen Embed Fallback

That “details” label is a default. We can insert a <summary> element to come up with something custom:

<details> <summary>Toggle content</summary> Open and close the element to toggle this content. </details> CodePen Embed Fallback

From here, the world is sorta our oyster because we can stuff any HTML we want inside the element:

<details> <summary>Toggle content</summary> <p>Open and close the element to toggle this content.</p> <img src="path/to/image.svg" alt=""> </details> The content is (sorta) searchable

The trouble with tucking content inside an element like this is that it’s hidden by default. Early on, this was considered an inaccessible practice because the content was undetected by in-page searching (like using CMD+F on the page), but that’s since changed, at least in Chrome, which will open the <details> element and reveal the content if it discovers a matched term.

That’s unfortunately not the case in Firefox and Safari, both of which skip the content stuffed inside a closed <details> element when doing in-page searches at the time I’m writing this. But it’s even more nuanced than that because Firefox (testing 134.0.1) matches searches when the <details> element is open, while Safari (testing 18.1) skips it altogether. That could very well change by the end of this year since searchability is one of the items being tackled in Interop 2025.

So, as for now, it’s a good idea to keep important content out of a <details> element when possible. For example, <details> is often used as a pattern for Frequently Asked Questions, where each “question” is an expandable “answer” that reveals additional information. That might not be the best idea if that content should be searchable on the page, at least for now.

CodePen Embed Fallback Open one at a time

All we have to do is give each <details> a matching name attribute:

<details name="notes"> <summary>Open Note</summary> <p> ... </p> </details> <details name="notes"> <!-- etc. --> </details> <details name="notes"> <!-- etc. --> </details> <details name="notes"> <!-- etc. --> </details>

This allows the elements to behave a lot more like true accordions, where one panel collapses when another expands.

CodePen Embed Fallback Style the marker

The marker is that little triangle that indicates whether the <details> element is open or closed. We can use the ::marker pseudo-element to style it, though it does come with constraints, namely that all we can do is change the color and font size, at least in Chrome and Firefox which both fully support ::marker. Safari partially supports it in the sense that it works for ordered and unordered list items (e.g., li::marker), but not for <details> (e.g., summary::marker).

Let’s look at an example that styles the markers for both <details> and an unordered list. At the time I’m writing this, Chrome and Firefox support styling the ::marker in both places, but Safari only works with the unordered list.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Notice how the ::marker selector in that last example selects both the <details> element and the unordered list element. We need to scope the selector to the <details> element if we want to target just that marker, right?

/* This doesn't work! */ details::marker { /* styles */ }

Nope! Instead, we need to scope it to the <summary> element. That’s what the marker is actually attached to.

/* This does work */ summary::marker { /* styles */ }

You might think that we can style the marker even if we were to leave the summary out of the markup. After all, HTML automatically inserts one for us by default. But that’s not the case. The <summary> element has to be present in the markup for it to match styles. You’ll see in the following demo that I’m using a generic ::marker selector that should match both <details> elements, but only the second one matches because it contains a <summary> in the HTML. Again, only Chrome and Firefox support for the time being:

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You might also think that we can swap out the triangle for something else since that’s something we can absolutely do with list items by way of the list-style-type property:

/* Does not work! */ summary::marker { list-style-type: square; }

…but alas, that’s not the case. An article over at web.dev says that it does work, but I’ve been unsuccessful at getting a proper example to work in any browser.

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That isn’t to say it shouldn’t work that way, but the specification isn’t explicit about it, so I have no expectations one way or another. Perhaps we’ll see an edit in a future specification that gets specific with <details> and to what extent CSS can modify the marker. Or maybe we won’t. It would be nice to have some way to chuck the triangle in favor of something else.

And what about removing the marker altogether? All we need to do is set the content property on it with an empty string value and voilà!

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Once the marker is gone, you could decide to craft your own custom marker with CSS by hooking into the <summary> element’s ::before pseudo-element.

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Just take note that Safari displays both the default marker and the custom one since it does not support the ::marker pseudo-element at the time I’m writing this. You’re probably as tired reading that as I am typing it. &#x1f913;

Style the content

Let’s say all you need to do is slap a background color on the content inside the <details> element. You could select the entire thing and set a background on it:

details { background: oklch(95% 0.1812 38.35); }

That’s cool, but it would be better if it only set the background color when the element is in an open state. We can use an attribute selector for that:

details[open] { background: oklch(95% 0.1812 38.35); }

OK, but what about the <summary> element? What if you don’t want that included in the background? Well, you could wrap the content in a <div> and select that instead:

details[open] div { background: oklch(95% 0.1812 38.35); } CodePen Embed Fallback

What’s even better is using the ::details-content pseudo-element as a selector. This way, we can select everything inside the <details> element without reaching for more markup:

::details-content { background: oklch(95% 0.1812 38.35); }

There’s no need to include details in the selector since ::details-content is only ever selectable in the context of a <details> element. So, it’s like we’re implicitly writing details::details-content.

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The ::details-content pseudo is still gaining browser support when I’m writing this, so it’s worth keeping an eye on it and using it cautiously in the meantime.

Animate the opening and closing

Click a default <details> element and it immediately snaps open and closed. I’m not opposed to that, but there are times when it might look (and feel) nice to transition like a smooth operator between the open and closed states. It used to take some clever hackery to pull this off, as Louis Hoebregts demonstrated using the Web Animations API several years back. Robin Rendle shared another way that uses a CSS animation:

details[open] p { animation: animateDown 0.2s linear forwards; } @keyframes animateDown { 0% { opacity: 0; transform: translatey(-15px); } 100% { opacity: 1; transform: translatey(0); } }

He sprinkled in a little JavaScript to make his final example fully interactive, but you get the idea:

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Notice what’s happening in there. Robin selects the paragraph element inside the <details> element when it is in an open state then triggers the animation. And that animation uses clever positioning to make it happen. That’s because there’s no way to know exactly how tall the paragraph — or the parent <details> element — is when expanded. We have to use explicit sizing, padding, and positioning to pull it all together.

But guess what? Since then, we got a big gift from CSS that allows us to animate an element from zero height to its auto (i.e., intrinsic) height, even if we don’t know the exact value of that auto height in advance. We start with zero height and clip the overflow so nothing hangs out. And since we have the ::details-content pseudo, we can directly select that rather than introducing more markup to the HTML.

::details-content { transition: height 0.5s ease, content-visibility 0.5s ease allow-discrete; height: 0; overflow: clip; }

Now we can opt into auto-height transitions using the interpolate-size property which was created just to enable transitions to keyword values, such as auto. We set it on the :root element so that it’s available everywhere, though you could scope it directly to a more specific instance if you’d like.

:root { interpolate-size: allow-keywords; }

Next up, we select the <details> element in its open state and set the ::details-content height to auto:

[open]::details-content { height: auto; }

We can make it so that this only applies if the browser supports auto-height transitions:

@supports (interpolate-size: allow-keywords) { :root { interpolate-size: allow-keywords; } [open]::details-content { height: auto; } }

And finally, we set the transition on the ::details-content pseudo to activate it:

::details-content { transition: height 0.5s ease; height: 0; overflow: clip; } /* Browser supports interpolate-size */ @supports (interpolate-size: allow-keywords) { :root { interpolate-size: allow-keywords; } [open]::details-content { height: auto; } } CodePen Embed Fallback

But wait! Notice how the animation works when opening <details>, but things snap back when closing it. Bramus notes that we need to include the content-visibility property in the transition because (1) it is implicitly set on the element and (2) it maps to a hidden state when the <details> element is closed. That’s what causes the content to snap to hidden when closing the <details>. So, let’s add content-visibility to our list of transitions:

::details-content { transition: height 0.5s ease, content-visibility 0.5s ease allow-discrete; height: 0; overflow: clip; } /* Browser supports interpolate-size */ @supports (interpolate-size: allow-keywords) { :root { interpolate-size: allow-keywords; } [open]::details-content { height: auto; } }

That’s much better:

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Note the allow-discrete keyword which we need to set since content-visibility is a property that only supports discrete animations and transitions.

Interesting tricks

Chris has a demo that uses <details> as a system for floating footnotes in content. I forked it and added the name attribute to each footnote so that they close when another one is opened.

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I mentioned John Rhea’s “Pop(over) The Balloons” game at the top of these notes:

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Bramus with a slick-looking horizontal accordion forked from another example. Note how the <details> element is used as a flex container:

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Chris with another clever trick that uses <details> to play and pause animated GIF image files. It’s doesn’t actually “pause” but the effect makes it seem like it does.

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Ryan Trimble with styling <details> as a dropdown menu and then using anchor positioning to set where the content opens.

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• HTML Living Standard (Section 4.11.1) by WHATWG
• “Quick Reminder that Details/Summary is the Easiest Way Ever to Make an Accordion” by Chris Coyier
• “A (terrible?) way to do footnotes in HTML” by Chris Coyier
• “Using <details> for Menus and Dialogs is an Interesting Idea” by Chris Coyier
• “Pausing a GIF with details/summary” by Chris Coyier
• “Exploring What the Details and Summary Elements Can Do” by Robin Rendle
• “More Details on <details>“ by Geoff Graham
• “::details-content“ by Geoff Graham
• “More options for styling <details>“ by Bramus
• “How to Animate the Details Element Using WAAPI” by Louis Hoebregts
• “Details and summary” by web.dev

Using & Styling the Details Element originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Editor’s note: This article is outside the typical range of topics we normally cover around here and touches on sensitive topics including recollections from an abusive marriage. It doesn’t delve into much detail about the abuse and ends on a positive note. Thanks to Lee for sharing his take on the intersection between life and web development and for allowing us to gain professional insights from his personal life.

When my dad was alive, he used to say that work and home life should exist in separate “watertight compartments.” I shouldn’t bring work home or my home life to work. There’s the quote misattributed to Mark Twain about a dad seeming to magically grow from a fool to a wise man in the few years it took the son to grow from a teen to an adult — but in my case, the older I get, the more I question my dad’s advice.

It’s easy to romanticize someone in death — but when my dad wasn’t busy yelling, gambling the rent money, or disappearing to another state, his presence was like an AI simulating a father, throwing around words that sounded like a thing to say from a dad, but not helpful if you stopped to think about his statements for more than a minute.

Let’s state the obvious: you shouldn’t do your personal life at work or work too much overtime when your family needs you. But you don’t need the watertight compartments metaphor to understand that. The way he said it hinted at something more complicated and awful — it was as though he wanted me to have a split personality. I shouldn’t be a developer at home, especially around him because he couldn’t relate, since I got my programming genes from my mum. And he didn’t think I should pour too much of myself into my dev work. The grain of truth was that even if you love your job, it can’t love you back. Yet what I’m hooked on isn’t one job, but the power of code and language.

The lonely coder seems to free his mind at night

Maybe my dad’s platitudinous advice to maintain a distance between my identity and my work would be practicable to a bricklayer or a president — but it’s poorly suited to someone whose brain is wired for web development. The job is so multidisciplinary it defies being put in a box you can leave at the office. That puzzle at work only makes sense because of a comment the person you love said before bedtime about the usability of that mobile game they play. It turns out the app is a competitor to the next company you join, as though the narrator of your life planted the earlier scene like a Chekov’s gun plot point, the relevance of which is revealed when you have that “a-ha” moment at work.

Meanwhile, existence is so online that as you try to unwind, you can’t unsee the matrix you helped create, even when it’s well past 5 p.m. The user interface you are building wants you to be a psychologist, an artist, and a scientist. It demands the best of every part of you. The answer about implementing a complex user flow elegantly may only come to you in a dream.

Don’t feel too bad if it’s the wrong answer. Douglas Crockford believes it’s a miracle we can code at all. He postulates that the mystery of how the human brain can program when he sees no evolutionary basis is why we haven’t hit the singularity. If we understood how our brains create software, we could build an AI that can program well enough to make a program better than itself. It could do that recursively till we have an AI smarter than us.

And yet so far the best we have is the likes of the aptly named Github Copilot. The branding captures that we haven’t hit the singularity so much as a duality, in which humanity hopefully harmonizes with what Noam Chomsky calls a “kind of super-autocomplete,” the same way autotune used right can make a good singer sound better, or it can make us all sound like the same robot. We can barely get our code working even now that we have all evolved into AI-augmented cyborgs, but we also can’t seem to switch off our dev mindset at will.

My dev brain has no “off” switch — is that a bug or a feature?

What if the ability to program represents a different category of intelligence than we can measure with IQ tests, similar to neurodivergence, which carries unique strengths and weaknesses? I once read a study in which the researchers devised a test that appeared to accurately predict which first-year computer science students would be able to learn to program. They concluded that an aptitude for programming correlates with a “comfort with meaninglessness.” The researchers said that to write a program you have to “accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test, the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact.”

The realization is dangerous, as both George Orwell and Philip K. Dick warned us. If you can control what words mean, you can control people and not just machines. If you have been swiping on Tinder and take a moment to sit with the feelings you associate with the phrases “swipe right” and “swipe left,” you find your emotional responses reveal that the app’s visual language has taught you what is good and what is bad. This recalls the scene in “Through the Looking-Glass,” in which Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that words mean what he wants them to mean. Humpty’s not the nicest dude. The Alice books can be interpreted as Dodgson’s critique of the Victorian education system which the author thought robbed children of their imagination, and Humpty makes his comments about language in a “scornful tone,” as though Alice should not only accept what he says, but she should know it without being told. To use a term that itself means different things to different people, Humpty is gaslighting Alice. At least he’s more transparent about it than modern gaslighters, and there’s a funny xkcd in which Alice uses Humpty’s logic against him to take all his possessions.

Perhaps the ability to shape reality by modifying the consensus on what words mean isn’t inherently good or bad, but in itself “meaningless,” just something that is true. It’s probably not a coincidence the person who coined the phrases “the map is not the territory” and “the word is not the thing” was an engineer. What we do with this knowledge depends on our moral compass, much like someone with a penchant for cutting people up could choose to be a surgeon or a serial killer.

Toxic humans are like blackhat hackers

For around seven years, I was with a person who was psychologically and physically abusive. Abuse boils down to violating boundaries to gain control. As awful as that was, I do not think the person was irrational. There is a natural appeal for human beings pushing boundaries to get what they want. Kids do that naturally, for example, and pushing boundaries by making CSS do things it doesn’t want to is the premise of my articles on CSS-Tricks. I try to create something positive with my impulse to exploit the rules, which I hope makes the world slightly more illuminated. However, to understand those who would do us harm, we must first accept that their core motivation meets a relatable human need, albeit in unacceptable ways.

For instance, more than a decade ago, the former hosting provider for CSS-Tricks was hacked. Chris Coyier received a reactivation notice for his domain name indicating the primary email for his account had changed to someone else’s email address. After this was resolved and the smoke cleared, Chris interviewed the hacker to understand how social engineering was used for the attack — but he also wanted to understand the hacker’s motivations. “Earl Drudge” (ananagram for “drug dealer”) explained that it was nothing personal that led him to target Chris — but Earl does things for“money and attention” and Chris reflected that “as different as the ways that we choose to spend our time are I do things for money and attention also, which makes us not entirely different at our core.”

It reminds me of the trope that cops and criminals share many personality traits. Everyone who works in technology shares the mindset that allows me to bend the meaning and assumptions within technology to my will, which is why the qualifiers of blackhat and whitehat exist. They are two sides of the same coin. However, the utility of applying the rule-bending mindset to life itself has been recognized in the popularization of the term “life hack.” Hopefully, we are whitehat life hackers. A life hack is like discovering emergent gameplay that is a logical if unexpected consequence of what occurs in nature. It’s a conscious form of human evolution.

If you’ve worked on a popular website, you will find a surprisingly high percentage of people follow the rules as long as you explain properly. Then again a large percentage will ignore the rules out of laziness or ignorance rather than malice. Then there are hackers and developers, who want to understand how the rules can be used to our advantage, or we are just curious what happens when we don’t follow the rules. When my seven-year-old does his online math, he sometimes deliberately enters the wrong answer, to see what animation triggers. This is a benign form of the hacker mentality — but now it’s time to talk about my experience with a lifehacker of the blackhat variety, who liked experimenting with my deepest insecurities because exploiting them served her purpose.

Verbal abuse is like a cross-site scripting attack

William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Although I now share my life with a person who is kind, supportive, and fascinating, I’m arguably still trapped in the previous, abusive relationship, because I have children with that person. Sometimes you can’t control who you receive input from, but recognizing the potential for that input to be malicious and then taking control of how it is interpreted is how we defend against both cross-site scriptingand verbal abuse.

For example, my ex would input the word “stupid” and plenty of other names I can’t share on this blog. She would scream this into my consciousness again and again. It is just a word, like a malicious piece of JavaScript a user might save into your website. It’s a set of characters with no inherent meaning. The way you allow it to be interpreted does the damage. When the “stupid” script ran in my brain, it was laden with meanings and assumptions in the way I interpreted it, like a keyword in a high-level language that has been designed to represent a set of lower-level instructions:

1. Intelligence was conflated with my self-worth.
2. I believed she would not say the hurtful things after her tearful promises not to say them again once she was aware it hurt me, as though she was not aware the first time.
3. I felt trapped being called names because I believed the relationship was something I needed.
4. I believed the input at face value that my actual intelligence was the issue, rather than the power my ex gained over me by generating the reaction she wanted from me by her saying one magic word.

Patching the vulnerabilities in your psyche

My psychologist pointed out that the ex likely knew I was not stupid but the intent was to damage my self-worth to make me easy to control. To acknowledge my strengths would not achieve that. I also think my brand of intelligence isn’t the type she values. For instance, the strengths that make me capable of being a software engineer are invisible to my abuser. Ultimately it’s irrelevant whether she believed what she was shouting — because the purpose was the effect her words had, rather than their surface-level meaning. The vulnerability she exploited was that I treated her input as a first-class citizen, able to execute with the same privileges I had given to the scripts I had written for myself. Once I sanitized that input using therapy and self-hypnosis, I stopped allowing her malicious scripts to have the same importance as the scripts I had written for myself, because she didn’t deserve that privilege. The untruths about myself have lost their power — I can still review them like an inert block of JavaScript but they can’t hijack my self-worth.

Like Alice using Humpty Dumpty’s logic against him in the xkcd cartoon, I showed that if words inherently have no meaning, there is no reason I can’t reengineer myself so that my meanings for the words trump how the abuser wanted me to use them to hurt myself and make me question my reality. The sanitized version of the “stupid” script rewrites those statements to:

1. I want to hurt you.
2. I want to get what I want from you.
3. I want to lower your self-worth so you will believe I am better than you so you won’t leave.

When you translate it like that, it has nothing to do with actual intelligence, and I’m secure enough to jokingly call myself an idiot in my previous article. It’s not that I’m colluding with the ghost of my ex in putting myself down. Rather, it’s a way of permitting myself not to be perfect because somewhere in human fallibility lies our ability to achieve what a computer can’t. I once worked with a manager who when I had a bug would say, “That’s good, at least you know you’re not a robot.” Being an idiot makes what I’ve achieved with CSS seem more beautiful because I work around not just the limitations in technology, but also my limitations. Some people won’t like it, or won’t get it. I have made peace with that.

We never expose ourselves to needless risk, but we must stay in our lane, assuming malicious input will keep trying to find its way in. The motive for that input is the malicious user’s journey, not ours. We limit the attack surface and spend our energy understanding how to protect ourselves rather than dwelling on how malicious people shouldn’t attempt what they will attempt.

Trauma and selection processes

In my new relationship, there was a stage in which my partner said that dating me was starting to feel like “a job interview that never ends” because I would endlessly vet her to avoid choosing someone who would hurt me again. The job interview analogy was sadly apt. I’ve had interviews in which the process maps out the scars from how the organization has previously inadvertently allowed negative forces to enter. The horror trope in which evil has to be invited reflects the truth that we unknowingly open our door to mistreatment and negativity.

My musings are not to be confused with victim blaming, but abusers can only abuse the power we give them. Therefore at some point, an interviewer may ask a question about what you would do with the power they are mulling handing you —and a web developer requires a lot of trust from a company. The interviewer will explain: “I ask because we’ve seen people do [X].” You can bet they are thinking of a specific person who did damage in the past. That knowledge might help you not to take the grilling personally. They probably didn’t give four interviews and an elaborate React coding challenge to the first few developers that helped get their company off the ground. However, at a different level of maturity, an organization or a person will evolve in what they need from a new person. We can’t hold that against them. Similar to a startup that only exists based on a bunch of ill-considered high-risk decisions, my relationship with my kids is more treasured than anything I own, and yet it all came from the worst mistake I ever made. My driver’s license said I was 30 but emotionally, I was unqualified to make the right decision for my future self, much like if you review your code from a year ago, it’s a good sign if you question what kind of idiot wrote it.

As determined as I was not to repeat that kind of mistake, my partner’s point about seeming to perpetually interview her was this: no matter how much older and wiser we think we are, letting a new person into our lives is ultimately always a leap of faith, on both sides of the equation.

Taking a planned plunge

Releasing a website into the wild represents another kind of leap of faith — but if you imagine an air-gapped machine with the best website in the world sitting on it where no human can access it, that has less value than the most primitive contact form that delivers value to a handful of users. My gambling dad may have put his appetite for risk to poor use. But it’s important to take calculated risks and trust that we can establish boundaries to limit the damage a bad actor can do, rather than kid ourselves that it’s possible to preempt risk entirely.

Hard things, you either survive them or you don’t. Getting security wrong can pose an existential threat to a company while compromising on psychological safety can pose an existential threat to a person. Yet there’s a reason “being vulnerable” is a positive phrase. When we create public-facing websites, it’s our job to balance the paradox of opening ourselves up to the world while doing everything to mitigate the risks. I decided to risk being vulnerable with you today because I hope it might help you see dev and life differently. So, I put aside the CodePens to get a little more personal, and if I’m right that front-end coding needs every part of your psyche to succeed, I hope you will permit dev to change your life, and your life experiences to change the way you do dev. I have faith that you’ll create something positive in both realms.

Applying the Web Dev Mindset to Dealing With Life Challenges originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

In software design and development, there's a hidden cost to everything we create: maintenance. Every new feature shipped becomes a long-term commitment that requires ongoing resources to support; bogging down teams and user interfaces.

When you buy a new bike, your thoughts probably go to epic rides, great scenery or better fitness. Less likely they drift toward lubing chains, filling tires, and swapping broken parts. But as soon as you're an owner, you're a maintainer. Add another bike to make up for the downtime when the first is being serviced? Now you're servicing two bikes.

The more you own the more you maintain. It's a truism that's especially useful to have rattling around in your brain when working on software design and development. New features, new design components, new documentation... as soon as they ship, they need maintenance. And yet, it's rare to hear the long-term costs of a feature come up during planning. Instead, we just keep adding things.

If every new feature just meant one more thing to maintain, things might not be that bad. But ten design components don't create ten relationships, they create forty-five potential interaction points to consider. Each new addition multiplies a system's complexity, not just adds to it.

This is why every design system keep spiraling out of control as it attempts to wrestle down this multiplicity. It's also why teams are always resource constrained and seeking headcount to keep shipping.

Instead, think hard about that next feature. Is it going to make up for those new maintenance costs? What about that design solution? Can you simplify it to be more like the rest of the UI instead of requiring new concepts or components? How you answer these questions will ultimately decide if you become what you maintain.