There is an amazing community effort happening in search of a new logo for CSS. I was a bit skeptical at first, as I never really considered CSS a “brand.” Why does it need a logo? For starters, the current logo seems… a bit dated. Displayed quite prominently is the number 3. As in CSS version 3, or simply CSS3. Depending on your IDE’s selected icon pack of choice, CSS file icons are often only the number 3. To give an incredibly glossed-over history of ..

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Kate Kaplan hits on something over at Nielsen Norman Group’s blog that’s been bugging me: The challenge with this icon is sparkle ambiguity: Participants in our recent research study generally agreed that it represented something a little special. But, what was that something? And why was it special? That was less obvious. We encountered widely and wildly varied interpretations. Man, I hate those sparkles. Correction: I loathe it as an icon but I use the hec..

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Not long ago, if we wanted a tooltip or popover positioned on top of another element, we would have to set our tooltip’s position to something other than static and use its inset/transform properties to place it exactly where we want. This works, but the element’s position is susceptible to user scrolls, zooming, or animations since the tooltip could overflow off of the screen or wind up in an awkward position. The only way to solve this was using JavaScript to check wh..

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An approach for creating masonry layouts in vanilla CSS is one of those “holy grail” aspirations. I actually tend to plop masonry and the classic “Holy Grail” layout in the same general era of web design. They’re different types of layouts, of course, but the Holy Grail was a done deal when we got CSS Grid. That leaves masonry as perhaps the last standing layout from the CSS 3 era that is left without a baked-in solution. I might argue that masonry is no longer e..

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The creator of CSS has said he originally envisaged CSS as the main web technology to control behavior on web pages, with scripting as a fallback when things weren’t possible declaratively in CSS. The rationale for a CSS-first approach was that “scripting is programming and programming is hard.” Since introducing the :hover pseudo-class, CSS has been standardizing patterns developers create in JavaScript and “harvesting” them into CSS standards. When you t..

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Miriam Suzanne’s in the middle of a redesign of her personal website. It began in August 2022. She’s made an entire series out of the work that’s worth your time, but I wanted to call out the fifth and latest installment because she presents a problem that I think we can all relate to: But the walls got in my way. Instead of minimal renovation, I got just far enough to live with it and then started a brand new Eleventy repo. The plan was to prototype […] an..

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Many of you — perhaps most of you — have been sitting on the sidelines while WordPress and WP Engine trade legal attacks on one another. It’s been widely covered as we watch it unfold in the open; ironically, in a sense. These things can take twists and turns and it doesn’t help that this just so happens to be an emotionally charged topic in certain circles. WordPress is still the leading CMS after all these years and by a long shot. Many developers make their livi..

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A new tool from Eric Meyer, Brian Kardell, and Stephanie Stimac backed with Igalia’s support. Brian announced it on his blog, as did Eric, describing it like this: What BCD Watch does is, it grabs releases of the Browser Compatibility Data (BCD) repository that underpins the support tables on MDN and services like caniuse.com.  It then analyzes what’s changed since the previous release. Every Monday, BCD Watch produces two reports. The Weekly Changes Re..

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The <select> element is a fairly straightforward concept: focus on it to reveal a set of <option>s that can be selected as the input’s value. That’s a great pattern and I’m not suggesting we change it. That said, I do enjoy poking at things and found an interesting way to turn a <select> into a dial of sorts — where options are selected by scrolling them into position, not totally unlike a combination lock or iOS date pickers. Anyone who..

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Mixing colors in CSS is pretty much a solved deal, thanks to the more recent color-mix() function as it gains support. Pass in two color values — any two color values at all — and optionally set the proportions. background-color: color-mix(#000 30%, #fff 70%); We also have the relative color syntax that can manipulate colors from one color space to another and modify them from there. The preeminent use case being a way to add opacity to color values that don’t sup..

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