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I’m utterly behind in learning about scroll-driven animations apart from the “reading progress bar” experiments all over CodePen. Well, I’m not exactly “green” on the topic; we’ve published a handful of articles on it including this neat-o one by Lee Meyer published the other week.

Our “oldest” article about the feature is by Bramus, dated back to July 2021. We were calling it “scroll-linked” animation back then. I specifically mention Bramus because there’s no one else working as hard as he is to discover practical use cases where scroll-driven animations shine while helping everyone understand the concept. He writes about it exhaustively on his personal blog in addition to writing the Chrome for Developers documentation on it.

But there’s also this free course he calls “Unleash the Power of Scroll-Driven Animations” published on YouTube as a series of 10 short videos. I decided it was high time to sit, watch, and learn from one of the best. These are my notes from it.

Introduction

• A scroll-driven animation is an animation that responds to scrolling. There’s a direct link between scrolling progress and the animation’s progress.
• Scroll-driven animations are different than scroll-triggered animations, which execute on scroll and run in their entirety. Scroll-driven animations pause, play, and run with the direction of the scroll. It sounds to me like scroll-triggered animations are a lot like the CSS version of the JavaScript intersection observer that fires and plays independently of scroll.
• Why learn this? It’s super easy to take an existing CSS animation or a WAAPI animation and link it up to scrolling. The only “new” thing to learn is how to attach an animation to scrolling. Plus, hey, it’s the platform!
• There are also performance perks. JavsScript libraries that establish scroll-driven animations typically respond to scroll events on the main thread, which is render-blocking… and JANK! We’re working with hardware-accelerated animations… and NO JANK. Yuriko Hirota has a case study on the performance of scroll-driven animations published on the Chrome blog.
• Supported in Chrome 115+. Can use @supports (animation-timeline: scroll()). However, I recently saw Bramus publish an update saying we need to look for animation-range support as well.

@supports ((animation-timeline: scroll()) and (animation-range: 0% 100%)) { /* Scroll-Driven Animations related styles go here */ /* This check excludes Firefox Nightly which only has a partial implementation at the moment of posting (mid-September 2024). */ }

• Remember to use prefers-reduced-motion and be mindful of those who may not want them.

Video One Core Concepts: scroll() and ScrollTimeline

Let’s take an existing CSS animation.

@keyframes grow-progress { from { transform: scaleX(0); } to { transform: scaleX(1); } } #progress { animation: grow-progress 2s linear forwards; }

Translation: Start with no width and scale it to its full width. When applied, it takes two seconds to complete and moves with linear easing just in the forwards direction.

This just runs when the #progress element is rendered. Let’s attach it to scrolling.

• animation-timeline: The timeline that controls the animation’s progress.
• scroll(): Creates a new scroll timeline set up to track the nearest ancestor scroller in the block direction.

#progress { animation: grow-progress 2s linear forwards; animation-timeline: scroll(); }

That’s it! We’re linked up. Now we can remove the animation-duration value from the mix (or set it to auto):

#progress { animation: grow-progress linear forwards; animation-timeline: scroll(); }

Note that we’re unable to plop the animation-timeline property on the animation shorthand, at least for now. Bramus calls it a “reset-only sub-property of the shorthand” which is a new term to me. Its value gets reset when you use the shorthand the same way background-color is reset by background. That means the best practice is to declare animation-timeline after animation.

/* YEP! */ #progress { animation: grow-progress linear forwards; animation-timeline: scroll(); } /* NOPE! */ #progress { animation-timeline: scroll(); animation: grow-progress linear forwards; }

Let’s talk about the scroll() function. It creates an anonymous scroll timeline that “walks up” the ancestor tree from the target element to the nearest ancestor scroll. In this example, the nearest ancestor scroll is the :root element, which is tracked in the block direction.

We can name scroll timelines, but that’s in another video. For now, know that we can adjust which axis to track and which scroller to target in the scroll() function.

animation-timeline: scroll(<axis> <scroller>);

• <axis>: The axis — be it block (default), inline, y, or x.
• <scroller>: The scroll container element that defines the scroll position that influences the timeline’s progress, which can be nearest (default), root (the document), or self.

If the root element does not have an overflow, then the animation becomes inactive. WAAPI gives us a way to establish scroll timelines in JavaScript with ScrollTimeline.

const $progressbar = document.querySelector(#progress); $progressbar.style.transformOrigin = '0% 50%'; $progressbar.animate( { transform: ['scaleX(0)', 'scaleY()'], }, { fill: 'forwards', timeline: new ScrollTimeline({ source: document.documentElement, // root element // can control `axis` here as well }), } ) Video Two Core Concepts: view() and ViewTimeline

First, we oughta distinguish a scroll container from a scroll port. Overflow can be visible or clipped. Clipped could be scrolling.

Those two bordered boxes show how easy it is to conflate scrollports and scroll containers. The scrollport is the visible part and coincides with the scroll container’s padding-box. When a scrollbar is present, that plus the scroll container is the root scroller, or the scroll container.

A view timeline tracks the relative position of a subject within a scrollport. Now we’re getting into IntersectionObserver territory! So, for example, we can begin an animation on the scroll timeline when an element intersects with another, such as the target element intersecting the viewport, then it progresses with scrolling.

Bramus walks through an example of animating images in long-form content when they intersect with the viewport. First, a CSS animation to reveal an image from zero opacity to full opacity (with some added clipping).

@keyframes reveal { from { opacity: 0; clip-path: inset(45% 20% 45% 20%); } to { opacity: 1; clip-path: inset(0% 0% 0% 0%); } } .revealing-image { animation: reveal 1s linear both; }

This currently runs on the document’s timeline. In the last video, we used scroll() to register a scroll timeline. Now, let’s use the view() function to register a view timeline instead. This way, we’re responding to when a .revealing-image element is in, well, view.

.revealing-image { animation: reveal 1s linear both; /* Rember to declare the timeline after the shorthand */ animation-timeline: view(); }

At this point, however, the animation is nice but only completes when the element fully exits the viewport, meaning we don’t get to see the entire thing. There’s a recommended way to fix this that Bramus will cover in another video. For now, we’re speeding up the keyframes instead by completing the animation at the 50% mark.

@keyframes reveal { from { opacity: 0; clip-path: inset(45% 20% 45% 20%); } 50% { opacity: 1; clip-path: inset(0% 0% 0% 0%); } }

More on the view() function:

animation-timeline: view(<axis> <view-timeline-inset>);

We know <axis> from the scroll() function — it’s the same deal. The <view-timeline-inset> is a way of adjusting the visibility range of the view progress (what a mouthful!) that we can set to auto (default) or a <length-percentage>. A positive inset moves in an outward adjustment while a negative value moves in an inward adjustment. And notice that there is no <scroller> argument — a view timeline always tracks its subject’s nearest ancestor scroll container.

OK, moving on to adjusting things with ViewTimeline in JavaScript instead.

const $images = document.querySelectorAll(.revealing-image); $images.forEach(($image) => { $image.animate( [ { opacity: 0, clipPath: 'inset(45% 20% 45% 20%)', offset: 0 } { opacity: 1; clipPath: 'inset(0% 0% 0% 0%)', offset: 0.5 } ], { fill: 'both', timeline: new ViewTimeline({ subject: $image, axis: 'block', // Do we have to do this if it's the default? }), } } )

This has the same effect as the CSS-only approach with animation-timeline.

Video Three Timeline Ranges Demystified

Last time, we adjusted where the image’s reveal animation ends by tweaking the keyframes to end at 50% rather than 100%. We could have played with the inset(). But there is an easier way: adjust the animation attachment range,

Most scroll animations go from zero scroll to 100% scroll. The animation-range property adjusts that:

animation-range: normal normal;

Those two values: the start scroll and end scroll, default:

animation-range: 0% 100%;

Other length units, of course:

animation-range: 100px 80vh;

The example we’re looking at is a “full-height cover card to fixed header”. Mouthful! But it’s neat, going from an immersive full-page header to a thin, fixed header while scrolling down the page.

@keyframes sticky-header { from { background-position: 50% 0; height: 100vh; font-size: calc(4vw + 1em); } to { background-position: 50% 100%; height: 10vh; font-size: calc(4vw + 1em); background-color: #0b1584; } }

If we run the animation during scroll, it takes the full animation range, 0%-100%.

.sticky-header { position: fixed; top: 0; animation: sticky-header linear forwards; animation-timeline: scroll(); }

Like the revealing images from the last video, we want the animation range a little narrower to prevent the header from animating out of view. Last time, we adjusted the keyframes. This time, we’re going with the property approach:

.sticky-header { position: fixed; top: 0; animation: sticky-header linear forwards; animation-timeline: scroll(); animation-range: 0vh 90vh; }

We had to subtract the full height (100vh) from the header’s eventual height (10vh) to get that 90vh value. I can’t believe this is happening in CSS and not JavaScript! Bramus sagely notes that font-size animation happens on the main thread — it is not hardware-accelerated — and the entire scroll-driven animation runs on the main as a result. Other properties cause this as well, notably custom properties.

Back to the animation range. It can be diagrammed like this:

The animation “cover range”. The dashed area represents the height of the animated target element.

Notice that there are four points in there. We’ve only been chatting about the “start edge” and “end edge” up to this point, but the range covers a larger area in view timelines. So, this:

animation-range: 0% 100%; /* same as 'normal normal' */

…to this:

animation-range: cover 0% cover 100%; /* 'cover normal cover normal' */

…which is really this:

animation-range: cover;

So, yeah. That revealing image animation from the last video? We could have done this, rather than fuss with the keyframes or insets:

animation-range: cover 0% cover 50%;

So nice. The demo visualization is hosted at scroll-driven-animations.style. Oh, and we have keyword values available: contain, entry, exit, entry-crossing, and exit-crossing.

contain entry exit

The examples so far are based on the scroller being the root element. What about ranges that are taller than the scrollport subject? The ranges become slightly different.

Just have to be aware of the element’s size and how it impacts the scrollport.

This is where the entry-crossing and entry-exit values come into play. This is a little mind-bendy at first, but I’m sure it’ll get easier with use. It’s clear things can get complex really quickly… which is especially true when we start working with multiple scroll-driven animation with their own animation ranges. Yes, that’s all possible. It’s all good as long as the ranges don’t overlap. Bramus uses a contact list demo where contact items animate when they enter and exit the scrollport.

@keyframes animate-in { 0% { opacity: 0; transform: translateY: 100%; } 100% { opacity: 1; transform: translateY: 0%; } } @keyframes animate-out { 0% { opacity: 1; transform: translateY: 0%; } 100% { opacity: 0; transform: translateY: 100%; } } .list-view li { animation: animate-in linear forwards, animate-out linear forwards; animation-timeline: view(); animation-range: entry, exit; /* animation-in, animation-out */ }

Another way, using entry and exit keywords directly in the keyframes:

@keyframes animate-in { entry 0% { opacity: 0; transform: translateY: 100%; } entry 100% { opacity: 1; transform: translateY: 0%; } } @keyframes animate-out { exit 0% { opacity: 1; transform: translateY: 0%; } exit 100% { opacity: 0; transform: translateY: 100%; } } .list-view li { animation: animate-in linear forwards, animate-out linear forwards; animation-timeline: view(); }

Notice that animation-range is no longer needed since its values are declared in the keyframes. Wow.

OK, ranges in JavaScript.:

const timeline = new ViewTimeline({ subjext: $li, axis: 'block', }) // Animate in $li.animate({ opacity: [ 0, 1 ], transform: [ 'translateY(100%)', 'translateY(0)' ], }, { fill: 'forwards', // One timeline instance with multiple ranges timeline, rangeStart: 'entry: 0%', rangeEnd: 'entry 100%', }) Video Four Core Concepts: Timeline Lookup and Named Timelines

This time, we’re learning how to attach an animation to any scroll container on the page without needing to be an ancestor of that element. That’s all about named timelines.

But first, anonymous timelines track their nearest ancestor scroll container.

<html> <!-- scroll --> <body> <div class="wrapper"> <div style="animation-timeline: scroll();"></div> </div> </body> </html>

Some problems might happen like when overflow is hidden from a container:

<html> <!-- scroll --> <body> <div class="wrapper" style="overflow: hidden;"> <!-- scroll --> <div style="animation-timeline: scroll();"></div> </div> </body> </html>

Hiding overflow means that the element’s content block is clipped to its padding box and does not provide any scrolling interface. However, the content must still be scrollable programmatically meaning this is still a scroll container. That’s an easy gotcha if there ever was one! The better route is to use overflow: clip rather than hidden because that prevents the element from becoming a scroll container.

Hiding oveflow = scroll container. Clipping overflow = no scroll container. Bramus says he no longer sees any need to use overflow: hidden these days unless you explicitly need to set a scroll container. I might need to change my muscle memory to make that my go-to for hiding clipping overflow.

Another funky thing to watch for: absolute positioning on a scroll animation target in a relatively-positioned container. It will never match an outside scroll container that is scroll(inline-nearest) since it is absolute to its container like it’s unable to see out of it.

We don’t have to rely on the “nearest” scroll container or fuss with different overflow values. We can set which container to track with named timelines.

.gallery { position: relative; } .gallery__scrollcontainer { overflow-x: scroll; scroll-timeline-name: --gallery__scrollcontainer; scroll-timeline-axis: inline; /* container scrolls in the inline direction */ } .gallery__progress { position: absolute; animation: progress linear forwards; animation-timeline: scroll(inline nearest); }

We can shorten that up with the scroll-timeline shorthand:

.gallery { position: relative; } .gallery__scrollcontainer { overflow-x: scroll; scroll-timeline: --gallery__scrollcontainer inline; } .gallery__progress { position: absolute; animation: progress linear forwards; animation-timeline: scroll(inline nearest); }

Note that block is the scroll-timeline-axis initial value. Also, note that the named timeline is a dashed-ident, so it looks like a CSS variable.

That’s named scroll timelines. The same is true of named view timlines.

.scroll-container { view-timeline-name: --card; view-timeline-axis: inline; view-timeline-inset: auto; /* view-timeline: --card inline auto */ }

Bramus showed a demo that recreates Apple’s old cover-flow pattern. It runs two animations, one for rotating images and one for setting an image’s z-index. We can attach both animations to the same view timeline. So, we go from tracking the nearest scroll container for each element in the scroll:

.covers li { view-timeline-name: --li-in-and-out-of-view; view-timeline-axis: inline; animation: adjust-z-index linear both; animation-timeline: view(inline); } .cards li > img { animation: rotate-cover linear both; animation-timeline: view(inline); }

…and simply reference the same named timelines:

.covers li { view-timeline-name: --li-in-and-out-of-view; view-timeline-axis: inline; animation: adjust-z-index linear both; animation-timeline: --li-in-and-out-of-view;; } .cards li > img { animation: rotate-cover linear both; animation-timeline: --li-in-and-out-of-view;; }

In this specific demo, the images rotate and scale but the updated sizing does not affect the view timeline: it stays the same size, respecting the original box size rather than flexing with the changes.

Phew, we have another tool for attaching animations to timelines that are not direct ancestors: timeline-scope.

timeline-scope: --example;

This goes on an parent element that is shared by both the animated target and the animated timeline. This way, we can still attach them even if they are not direct ancestors.

<div style="timeline-scope: --gallery"> <div style="scroll-timeline: --gallery-inline;"> ... </div> <div style="animation-timeline: --gallery;"></div> </div>

It accepts multiple comma-separated values:

timeline-scope: --one, --two, --three; /* or */ timeline-scope: all; /* Chrome 116+ */

There’s no Safari or Firefox support for the all kewword just yet but we can watch for it at Caniuse (or the newer BCD Watch!).

This video is considered the last one in the series of “core concepts.” The next five are more focused on use cases and examples.

Video Five Add Scroll Shadows to a Scroll Container

In this example, we’re conditionally showing scroll shadows on a scroll container. Chris calls scroll shadows one his favorite CSS-Tricks of all time and we can nail them with scroll animations.

Here is the demo Chris put together a few years ago:

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That relies on having a background with multiple CSS gradients that are pinned to the extremes with background-attachment: fixed on a single selector. Let’s modernize this, starting with a different approach using pseudos with sticky positioning:

.container::before, .container::after { content: ""; display: block; position: sticky; left: 0em; right 0em; height: 0.75rem; &::before { top: 0; background: radial-gradient(...); } &::after { bottom: 0; background: radial-gradient(...); } }

The shadows fade in and out with a CSS animation:

@keyframes reveal { 0% { opacity: 0; } 100% { opacity: 1; } } .container { overflow:-y auto; scroll-timeline: --scroll-timeline block; /* do we need `block`? */ &::before, &::after { animation: reveal linear both; animation-timeline: --scroll-timeline; } }

This example rocks a named timeline, but Bramus notes that an anonymous one would work here as well. Seems like anonymous timelines are somewhat fragile and named timelines are a good defensive strategy.

The next thing we need is to set the animation’s range so that each pseudo scrolls in where needed. Calculating the range from the top is fairly straightforward:

.container::before { animation-range: 1em 2em; }

The bottom is a little tricker. It should start when there are 2em of scrolling and then only travel for 1em. We can simply reverse the animation and add a little calculation to set the range based on it’s bottom edge.

.container::after { animation-direction: reverse; animation-range: calc(100% - 2em) calc(100% - 1em); }

Still one more thing. We only want the shadows to reveal when we’re in a scroll container. If, for example, the box is taller than the content, there is no scrolling, yet we get both shadows.

This is where the conditional part comes in. We can detect whether an element is scrollable and react to it. Bramus is talking about an animation keyword that’s new to me: detect-scroll.

@keyframes detect-scroll { from, to { --can-scroll: ; /* value is a single space and acts as boolean */ } } .container { animation: detect-scroll; animation-timeline: --scroll-timeline; animation-fill-mode: none; }

Gonna have to wrap my head around this… but the general idea is that --can-scroll is a boolean value we can use to set visibility on the pseudos:

.content::before, .content::after { --vis-if-can-scroll: var(--can-scroll) visible; --vis-if-cant-scroll: hidden; visibility: var(--vis-if-can-scroll, var(--vis-if-cant-scroll)); }

Bramus points to this CSS-Tricks article for more on the conditional toggle stuff.

Video Six Animate Elements in Different Directions

This should be fun! Let’s say we have a set of columns:

<div class="columns"> <div class="column reverse">...</div> <div class="column">...</div> <div class="column reverse">...</div> </div>

The goal is getting the two outer reverse columns to scroll in the opposite direction as the inner column scrolls in the other direction. Classic JavaScript territory!

The columns are set up in a grid container. The columns flex in the column direction.

/* run if the browser supports it */ @supports (animation-timeline: scroll()) { .column-reverse { transform: translateY(calc(-100% + 100vh)); flex-direction: column-reverse; /* flows in reverse order */ } .columns { overflow-y: clip; /* not a scroll container! */ } }

First, the outer columns are pushed all the way up so the bottom edges are aligned with the viewport’s top edge. Then, on scroll, the outer columns slide down until their top edges re aligned with the viewport’s bottom edge.

The CSS animation:

@keyframes adjust-position { from /* the top */ { transform: translateY(calc(-100% + 100vh)); } to /* the bottom */ { transform: translateY(calc(100% - 100vh)); } } .column-reverse { animation: adjust-position linear forwards; animation-timeline: scroll(root block); /* viewport in block direction */ }

The approach is similar in JavaScript:

const timeline = new ScrollTimeline({ source: document.documentElement, }); document.querySelectorAll(".column-reverse").forEach($column) => { $column.animate( { transform: [ "translateY(calc(-100% + 100vh))", "translateY(calc(100% - 100vh))" ] }, { fill: "both", timeline, } ); } Video Seven Animate 3D Models and More on Scroll

This one’s working with a custom element for a 3D model:

<model-viewer alt="Robot" src="robot.glb"></model-viewer>

First, the scroll-driven animation. We’re attaching an animation to the component but not defining the keyframes just yet.

@keyframes foo { } model-viewer { animation: foo linear both; animation-timeline: scroll(block root); /* root scroller in block direction */ }

There’s some JavaScript for the full rotation and orientation:

// Bramus made a little helper for handling the requested animation frames import { trackProgress } from "https://esm.sh/@bramus/sda-utilities"; // Select the component const $model = document.QuerySelector("model-viewer"); // Animation begins with the first iteration const animation = $model.getAnimations()[0]; // Variable to get the animation's timing info let progress = animation.effect.getComputedTiming().progress * 1; // If when finished, $progress = 1 if (animation.playState === "finished") progress = 1; progress = Math.max(0.0, Math.min(1.0, progress)).toFixed(2); // Convert this to degrees $model.orientation = `0deg 0deg $(progress * -360)deg`;

We’re using the effect to get the animation’s progress rather than the current timed spot. The current time value is always measured relative to the full range, so we need the effect to get the progress based on the applied animation.

Video Eight Scroll Velocity Detection

The video description is helpful:

Bramus goes full experimental and uses Scroll-Driven Animations to detect the active scroll speed and the directionality of scroll. Detecting this allows you to style an element based on whether the user is scrolling (or not scrolling), the direction they are scrolling in, and the speed they are scrolling with … and this all using only CSS.

First off, this is a hack. What we’re looking at is expermental and not very performant. We want to detect the animations’s velocity and direction. We start with two custom properties.

@keyframes adjust-pos { from { --scroll-position: 0; --scroll-position-delayed: 0; } to { --scroll-position: 1; --scroll-position-delayed: 1; } } :root { animation: adjust-pos linear both; animation-timeline: scroll(root); }

Let’s register those custom properties so we can interpolate the values:

@property --scroll-position { syntax: "<number>"; inherits: true; initial-value: 0; } @property --scroll-position-delayed { syntax: "<number>"; inherits: true; initial-value: 0; }

As we scroll, those values change. If we add a little delay, then we can stagger things a bit:

:root { animation: adjust-pos linear both; animation-timeline: scroll(root); } body { transition: --scroll-position-delayed 0.15s linear; }

The fact that we’re applying this to the body is part of the trick because it depends on the parent-child relationship between html and body. The parent element updates the values immediately while the child lags behind just a tad. The evaluate to the same value, but one is slower to start.

We can use the difference between the two values as they are staggered to get the velocity.

:root { animation: adjust-pos linear both; animation-timeline: scroll(root); } body { transition: --scroll-position-delayed 0.15s linear; --scroll-velocity: calc( var(--scroll-position) - var(--scroll-position-delayed) ); }

Clever! If --scroll-velocity is equal to 0, then we know that the user is not scrolling because the two values are in sync. A positive number indicates the scroll direction is down, while a negative number indicates scrolling up,.

There’s a little discrepancy when scrolling abruptly changes direction. We can fix this by tighening the transition delay of --scroll-position-delayed but then we’re increasing the velocity. We might need a multiplier to further correct that… that’s why this is a hack. But now we have a way to sniff the scrolling speed and direction!

Here’s the hack using math functions:

body { transition: --scroll-position-delayed 0.15s linear; --scroll-velocity: calc( var(--scroll-position) - var(--scroll-position-delayed) ); --scroll-direction: sign(var(--scroll-velocity)); --scroll-speed: abs(var(--scroll-velocity)); }

This is a little funny because I’m seeing that Chrome does not yet support sign() or abs(), at least at the time I’m watching this. Gotta enable chrome://flags. There’s a polyfill for the math brought to you by Ana Tudor right here on CSS-Tricks.

So, now we could theoretically do something like skew an element by a certain amount or give it a certain level of background color saturation depending on the scroll speed.

.box { transform: skew(calc(var(--scroll-velocity) * -25deg)); transition: background 0.15s ease; background: hsl( calc(0deg + (145deg * var(--scroll-direction))) 50 % 50% ); }

We could do all this with style queries should we want to:

@container style(--scroll-direction: 0) { /* idle */ .slider-item { background: crimson; } } @container style(--scroll-direction: 1) { /* scrolling down */ .slider-item { background: forestgreen; } } @container style(--scroll-direction: -1) { /* scrolling down */ .slider-item { background: lightskyblue; } }

Custom properties, scroll-driven animations, and style queries — all in one demo! These are wild times for CSS, tell ya what.

Video Nine Outro

The tenth and final video! Just a summary of the series, so no new notes here. But here’s a great demo to cap it off.

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Unleash the Power of Scroll-Driven Animations originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Change can certainly be scary whenever a beloved, independent software library becomes a part of a larger organization. I’m feeling a bit more excitement than concern this time around, though.

If you haven’t heard, GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform) is teaming up with the visual website builder, Webflow. This mutually beneficial advancement not only brings GSAP’s powerful animation capabilities to Webflow’s graphical user interface but also provides the GSAP team the resources necessary to take development to the next level.

GSAP has been independent software for nearly 15 years (since the Flash and ActionScript days!) primarily supported by Club GSAP memberships, their paid tiers which offer even more tools and plugins to enhance GSAP further. GSAP is currently used on more than 12 million websites.

I chatted with Cassie Evans — GSAP’s Lead Bestower of Animation Superpowers and CSS-Tricks contributor — who confidently expressed that GSAP will remain available for the wider web.

It’s a big change, but we think it’s going to be a good one – more resources for the core library, more people maintaining the GSAP codebase, money for events and merch and community support, a VISUAL GUI in the pipeline.

The Webflow community has cause for celebration as well, as direct integration with GSAP has been a wishlist item for a while.

The webflow community is so lovely and creative and supportive and friendly too. It’s a good fit.

I’m so happy for Jack, Cassie, and Rodrigo, as well as super excited to see what happens next. If you don’t want to take my word for it, check out what Brody has to say about it.

Combining forces, GSAP & Webflow! originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

I totally get the goal here: make CSS more modular and scalable in WordPress. Put all your global WordPress theme styles in a single file, including variations. JSON offers a nicely structured syntax that’s easily consumable by JavaScript, thereby allowing the sweet affordance of loading exactly what we want when we want it.

The problem, to me, is that writing “CSS” in a theme.json file is a complete mental model switcher-oo. Rather than selectors, we have a whole set of objects we have to know about just to select something. We have JSON properties that look and feel like CSS properties, only they have to be camelCased being JavaScript and all. And we’re configuring features in the middle of the styles, meaning we’ve lost a clear separation of concerns.

I’m playing devil’s advocate, of course. There’s a lot of upside to abstracting CSS with JSON for the very niche purpose of theming CMS templates and components. But after a decade of “CSS-in-JS is the Way™” I’m less inclined to buy into it. CSS is the bee’s knees just the way it is and I’m OK relying on it solely, whether it’s in the required style.css file or some other plain ol’ CSS file I generate. But that also means I’m losing out on the WordPress features that require you to write styles in a theme.json file, like style variations that can be toggled directly in the WordPress admin.

Regardless of all that, I’m linking this up because Justin does bang-up work (no surprise, really) explaining and illustrating the ways of CSS-in-WordPress. We have a complete guide that Ganesh rocked a couple of years ago. You might check that to get familiar with some terminology, jump into a nerdy deep dive on how WordPress generates classes from JSON, or just use the reference tables as a cheat sheet.

Mastering theme.json: You might not need CSS originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

One of the interesting (but annoying) things about CSS is the background of children’s elements can bleed out of the border radius of the parent element. Here’s an example of a card with an inner element. If the inner element is given a background, it can bleed out of the card’s border.

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The easiest way to resolve this problem is to add overflow: hidden to the card element. I’m sure that’s the go-to solution most of us reach for when this happens.

But doing this creates a new problem — content outside the card element gets clipped off — so you can’t use negative margins or position: absolute to shift the children’s content out of the card.

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There is a slightly more tedious — but more effective — way to prevent a child’s background from bleeding out of the parent’s border-radius. And that is to add the same border-radius to the child element.

The easiest way to do this is allowing the child to inherit the parent’s border-radius:

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If the border-radius shorthand is too much, you can still inherit the radius for each of the four corners on a case-by-case basis:

.child { border-top-left-radius: inherit; border-top-right-radius: inherit; border-bottom-left-radius: inherit; border-bottom-right-radius: inherit; }

Or, for those of you who’re willing to use logical properties, here’s the equivalent. (For an easier way to understand logical properties, replace top and left with start, and bottom and right with end.)

.child { border-start-start-radius: inherit; border-top-end-radius: inherit; border-end-start-radius: inherit; border-end-end-radius: inherit; } Can’t we just apply a background on the card?

If you have a background directly on the .card that contains the border-radius, you will achieve the same effect. So, why not?

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Well, sometimes you can’t do that. One situation is when you have a .card that’s split into two, and only one part is colored in.

CodePen Embed Fallback So, why should we do this?

Peace of mind is probably the best reason. At the very least, you know you won’t be creating problems down the road with the radius manipulation solution.

This pattern is going to be especially helpful when CSS Anchor Positioning gains full support. I expect that would become the norm popover positioning soon in about 1-2 years.

That said, for popovers, I personally prefer to move the popover content out of the document flow and into the <body> element as a direct descendant. By doing this, I prevent overflow: hidden from cutting off any of my popovers when I use anchor positioning.

Solving Background Overflow With Inherited Border Radii originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

What’s in a word? Actions. In the realm of user interfaces, a word is construed as the telltale of a control’s action. Sometimes it points us in the correct direction, and sometimes it leads us astray. We talk a lot about semantics in front-end web development, but outside of code, semantics are at the heart of copywriting where each word we convey can mean different things to different people. Words, if done right, add clarity and direction.

As a web user, I’ve come across words in user interfaces that have misled me. And not necessarily by design, either. Some words are synonymous with others and their true meaning depends entirely on context. Some words are easy to mistake for an unintended meaning because they are packed with so much meaning. A word might belong to a fellowship of interchangeable words.

Although I’m quite riled up when I misread content on a page — upset at the lack of clarity more than anything — as a developer, I can’t say I’ve always chosen the best possible words or combination of words for all the user interfaces I’ve ever made. But experience, both as a user and a developer, has elevated my commonsense when it comes to some of the literary choices I make while coding.

This article covers the words I choose for endings, to help users move away, and move on, without any confusion from the current process they are at on the screen. I went down this rabbit hole because I often find that ending something can mean many things — whether it be canceling an action, quitting an application, closing an element, navigating back, exiting a chat interaction… You get the idea. There are many ways to say that something is done, complete, and ready to move on to something else. I want to add clarity to that.

Getting Canceled

If there’s a Hall of Fame for button labels, this is the Babe Ruth of them all. “Cancel” is a widely used word to indicate an action that ends something. Cancel is a sharp, tenacious action. The person wants to bail on some process that didn’t go the way they expected it to. Maybe the page reveals a form that the person didn’t realize would be so long, so they want to back off. It could be something you have no control over whatsoever, like that person realizing they do not have their credit card information handy during checkout and they have to come back another time.

Cancel can feel personal at times, right? Don’t like the shipping costs calculated at checkout? Cancel the payment. Don’t like the newsletter? Cancel The Subscription. But really, the person only wants to undo an incorrect action or decision leaving no trace of it behind in favor of a clean slate to try again… or not.

The only times I feel betrayed by the word cancel is when the process I’m trying to end continues anyway. That comes up most when submitting forms with incorrect information. I enter something inadvertently, hit a big red Cancel button, yet the information I’ve “saved” persists to the extent that I either need to contact customer support or start looking for alternatives.

That’s the bottom line: Use “cancel” as an opportunity to confirm. It’s the person telling you, “Hey, that’s not actually what I meant to do,” and you get to step in and be the hero to wipe the mistake clean and set things up for a second chance. We’re not technically “ending” anything but rather starting clean and picking things back up for a better go. Think about that the next time you find yourself needing a label that encourages the user to try again. You might even consider synonyms that are less closely associated with closed endings, such as reset or retry.

Quitting or Exiting?

Quit window, quit tab, quit app — now we’re talking about finality. When we “quit” or “exit” something, we’re changing course. We’ve made progress in one direction and decide it’s time to chart a different path. If we’re thinking about it in terms of freeway traffic, you might say that “quitting” is akin to pulling over and killing the engine, and “exiting” is taking leaving the freeway for another road. There’s a difference, although the two terms are closely related.

As far as we’re concerned as developers, quit and exit are hard stop points in an application. It’s been put to rest. Nothing else beyond this should be possible except its rebirth when the service is restarted or reopened. So, if your page is capable of nuking the current experience and the user takes it, then quit is the better label to make that point. We’re quitting and have no plans to restart or re-engage. If you were to “quit” your job, it’s not like your employer is expecting you to report for duty on Monday… or any other day for that matter.

But here’s my general advice about the word quit: only use it if you have to. I see very few use cases where we actually want to offer someone a true way to quit something. It’s so effective at conveying finality in web interfaces that it shuts the door on any future actions. For instance, I find that cancel often works in its place. And, personally, I find that saying “cancel payment” is more widely applicable. It’s softer and less rigid in the sense that it leaves the possibility to resume a process down the road.

Quit is also a simple process. Just clear everything and be gone. But if quitting means the user might lose some valuable data or progress, then that’s something they have to be warned about. In that case, exit and save may be better guidance.

I consider Exit the gentler twin of Quit. I prefer Quit just for the ultimatum of it. I see Exit used less frequently in interfaces than I see Quit. In rare cases, I might see Exit used specifically because of its softer nature to Quit even though “quitting” is the correct semantic choice given that the user really wants to wipe things clean and the assurance that nothing is left behind. Sometimes a “tougher” term is more reassuring.

Exit, however, is an excellent choice for actions that represent the end of human-to-human interactions — things like Exit Group, Exit Chat, Exit Streaming, Exit Class. If this person is kindly saying goodbye to someone or something but open to future interactions, allow them to exit when they’re done. They’re not quitting anything and we aren’t shoving them out the door.

Going Back (and Forth)

Let’s talk about navigation. That’s the way we describe moving around the internet. We navigate from one place to another, to another, to another, and so on. It’s a journey of putting one digital foot in front of the other on the way to somewhere. That journey comes to an end when we get to our destination… or when we “quit” or “exit” the journey as we discussed above.

But the journey may take twists and turns. Not all movement is linear on the web. That’s why we often leave breadcrumbs in interfaces, right? It’s wayfinding on the web and provides people with a way to go “back” where they came from. Maybe that person forgot a step and needs to head back in order to move forward again.

In other words, back displaces people — laterally and hierarchically. Laterally, back (and its synonym, previous), backtracks across the same level in a process, for instance, between two sections of the same form, or two pages of the same document. Hierarchically, back — not to mention more explicit variants like “home” — is a level above that in the navigation hierarchy.

I like the explicit nature of saying something like “Home” when it comes to navigating someone “back” to a location or state. There’s no ambiguity there: hey, let’s go back home. Being explicit opens you up to more verbose labels but brevity isn’t always the goal. Even in iconography, adding more detail to a visual can help add clarity. The same is true with content in user interfaces. My favorite example is the classic “Back to Top” button on many pages that navigate you to the “top” of the page. We’re going “back to the top” which would not have been clear if we had used “Back” alone. Back where? That’s an important question — particularly when working with in-page anchors — and the answer may not be as obvious to others as it is to you. Communicating that level of hierarchy explicitly is a navigational feature.

While the “Back to Top” example I gave is a better illustration of lateral displacement than hierarchical displacement, I tend to avoid the label back with any sort of lateral navigation because moving laterally typically involves navigating between states more than navigating between pages. For example, the user may be navigating from a “logged in” state to a “logged out” state. In this case, I prefer being even more explicit — e.g., Save and Go Back, or Cancel and Go Home — than hierarchical navigation because we’re changing states on top of moving away from something.

Closing Down

Close is yet another term you’ll find in the wild for conveying the “end” of something. It’s quite similar to Back in the sense that it serves dual purposes. It can be for navigation — close the current page and go back — or it can be for canceling an action — close the current page, and either discard or save all the data entered so far.

I prefer Close for neither of those cases. If we’re in the context of navigation, I like the clarity of the more explicit guidance we discussed above, e.g., Go Back, Previous, or Go Home. Giving someone an instruction to Close doesn’t say where that person is going to land once navigating away from the current page. And if we’re dealing with actions, Save and Close affirms the person that their data will be saved, rather than simply “closing” it out. If we were to simply say “cancel” instead, the insinuation is that the user is quitting the action and can expect to lose their work.

The one time I do feel that “Close” is the ideal label is working with pop-up dialogues and modals. Placing “Close” at the top-right (or the block-start, inline-end edge if we’re talking logical directions) corner is more than clear enough about what happens to the pop-up or modal when clicking it. We can afford to be a little less explicit with our semantics when someone’s focus is trapped in a specific context.

The End.

I’ve saved the best for last, right? There’s no better way to connote an ending than simply calling it the “end”. It works well when we pair it with what’s ending.

End Chat. End Stream. End Webinar.

You’re terminating an established connection, not with a process, but with a human. And this is not some abrupt termination like Quit or Cancel. It’s more of a proper goodbye. Consider it also a synonym to Exit because the person ending the interaction may simply be taking a break. They’re not necessarily quitting something for good. Let’s leave the light on the front patio for them to return later and pick things back up..

And speaking of end, we’ve reached the end of this article. That’s the tricky, but liberating, thing about content semantics — some words may technically be correct but still mislead site visitors. It’s not that we’re ever trying to give someone bad directions, but it can still happen because this is a world where there are many ways of saying the same thing. Our goal is to be unambiguous and the milestone is clarity. Settling on the right word or combination of words takes effort. Anyone who has struggled with naming things in code knows about this. It’s the same for naming things outside of code.

I did not make an attempt to cover each and every word or way to convey endings. The point is that our words matter and we have all the choice and freedom in the world to find the best fit. But maybe you’ve recently run into a situation where you needed to “end” something and communicate that in an interface. Did you rely on something definitive and permanent (e.g. quit) or did you find that softer language (e.g. exit) was the better direction? What other synonyms did you consider? I’d love to know!

End Article.

Close, Exit, Cancel: How to End User Interactions Well originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

CSS gradients have been so long that there’s no need to rehash what they are and how to use them. You have surely encountered them at some point in your front-end journey, and if you follow me, you also know that I use them all the time. I use them for CSS patterns, nice CSS decorations, and even CSS loaders. But even so, gradients have a tough syntax that can get very complicated very quickly if you’re not paying attention.

In this article, we are not going to make complex stuff with CSS gradients. Instead, we’re keeping things simple and I am going to walk through all of the incredible things we can do with just one gradient.

Only one gradient? In this case, reading the doc should be enough, no?

No, not really. Follow along and you will see that gradients are easy at their most basic, but are super powerful if we push them — or in this case, just one — to their limits.

CSS patterns

One of the first things you learn with gradients is that we can establish repeatable patterns with them. You’ve probably seen some examples of checkerboard patterns in the wild. That’s something we can quickly pull off with a single CSS gradient. In this case, we can reach for the repeating-conic-gradient() function:

background: repeating-conic-gradient(#000 0 25%, #fff 0 50%) 0 / 100px 100px;

A more verbose version of that without the background shorthand:

background-image: repeating-conic-gradient(#000 0 25%, #fff 0 50%); background-size: 100px 100px;

Either way, the result is the same:

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Pretty simple so far, right? You have two colors that you can easily swap out for other colors, plus the background-size property to control the square shapes.

If we change the color stops — where one color stops and another starts — we get another cool pattern based on triangles:

background: repeating-conic-gradient(#000 0 12.5%, #fff 0 25%) 0 / 100px 100px; CodePen Embed Fallback

If you compare the CSS for the two demos we’ve seen so far, you’ll see that all I did was divide the color stops in half, 25% to 12.5% and 50% to 25%.

Another one? Let’s go!

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This time I’m working with CSS variables. I like this because variables make it infinitely easier to configure the gradients by updating a few values without actually touching the syntax. The calculation is a little more complex this time around, as it relies on trigonometric functions to get accurate values.

I know what you are thinking: Trigonometry? That sounds hard. That is certainly true, particularly if you’re new to CSS gradients. A good way to visualize the pattern is to disable the repetition using the no-repeat value. This isolates the pattern to one instance so that you clearly see what’s getting repeated. The following example declares background-image without a background-size so you can see the tile that repeats and better understand each gradient:

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I want to avoid a step-by-step tutorial for each and every example we’re covering so that I can share lots more examples without getting lost in the weeds. Instead, I’ll point you to three articles you can refer to that get into those weeds and allow you to pick apart our examples.

• How to create background patterns using CSS & conic-gradient (Verpex blog)
• Learn CSS radial-gradient by Building Background Patterns (freeCodeCamp)
• Background Patterns, Simplified by Conic Gradients (Ana Tudor)

I’ll also encourage you to open my online collection of patterns for even more examples. Most of the examples are made with multiple gradients, but there are plenty that use only one. The goal of this article is to learn a few “single gradient” tricks — but the ultimate goal is to be able to combine as many gradients as possible to create cool stuff!

Grid lines

Let’s start with the following example:

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You might claim that this belongs under “Patterns” — and you are right! But let’s make it more flexible by adding variables for controlling the thickness and the total number of cells. In other words, let’s create a grid!

.grid-lines { --n: 3; /* number of rows */ --m: 5; /* number of columns */ --s: 80px; /* control the size of the grid */ --t: 2px; /* the thickness */ width: calc(var(--m)*var(--s) + var(--t)); height: calc(var(--n)*var(--s) + var(--t)); background: conic-gradient(from 90deg at var(--t) var(--t), #0000 25%, #000 0) 0 0/var(--s) var(--s); }

First of all, let’s isolate the gradient to better understand the repetition (like we did in the previous section).

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One repetition will give us a horizontal and a vertical line. The size of the gradient is controlled by the variable --s, so we define the width and height as a multiplier to get as many lines as we want to establish the grid pattern.

What’s with “+ var(--t)” in the equation?

The grid winds up like this without it:

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We are missing lines at the right and the bottom which is logical considering the gradient we are using. To fix this, the gradient needs to be repeated one more time, but not at full size. For this reason, we are adding the thickness to the equation to have enough space for the extra repetition and the get the missing lines.

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And what about a responsive configuration where the number of columns depends on the available space? We remove the --m variable and define the width like this:

width: calc(round(down, 100%, var(--s)) + var(--t));

Instead of multiplying things, we use the round() function to tell the browser to make the element full width and round the value to be a multiple of --s. In other words, the browser will find the multiplier for us!

Resize the below and see how the grid behaves:

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In the future, we will also be able to do this with the calc-size() function:

width: calc-size(auto, round(down, size, var(--s)) + var(--t));

Using calc-size() is essentially the same as the last example, but instead of using 100% we consider auto to be the width value. It’s still early to adopt such syntax. You can test the result in the latest version of Chrome at the time of this writing:

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Let’s try something different: vertical (or horizontal) dashed lines where we can control everything.

.dashed-lines { --t: 2px; /* thickness of the lines */ --g: 50px; /* gap between lines */ --s: 12px; /* size of the dashes */ background: conic-gradient(at var(--t) 50%, #0000 75%, #000 0) var(--g)/calc(var(--g) + var(--t)) var(--s); } CodePen Embed Fallback

Can you figure out how it works? Here is a figure with hints:

Try creating the horizontal version on your own. Here’s a demo that shows how I tackled it, but give it a try before peeking at it.

What about a grid with dashed lines — is that possible?

Yes, but using two gradients instead of one. The code is published over at my collection of CSS shapes. And yes, the responsive behavior is there as well!

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How would you create the following gradient in CSS?

You might start by picking as many color values along the rainbow as you can, then chaining them in a linear-gradient:

linear-gradient(90deg, red, yellow, green, /* etc. */, red);

Good idea, but it won’t get you all the way there. Plus, it requires you to juggle color stops and fuss with them until you get things just right.

There is a simpler solution. We can accomplish this with just one color!

background: linear-gradient(90deg in hsl longer hue, red 0 0);

I know, the syntax looks strange if you’re seeing the new color interpolation for the first time.

If I only declare this:

background: linear-gradient(90deg, red, red); /* or (90deg, red 0 0) */

…the browser creates a gradient that goes from red to red… red everywhere! When we set this “in hsl“, we’re changing the color space used for the interpolation between the colors:

background: linear-gradient(90deg in hsl, red, red);

Now, the browser will create a gradient that goes from red to red… this time using the HSL color space rather than the default RGB color space. Nothing changes visually… still see red everywhere.

The longer hue bit is what’s interesting. When we’re in the HSL color space, the hue channel’s value is an angle unit (e.g., 25deg). You can see the HSL color space as a circle where the angle defines the position of the color within that circle.

Since it’s a circle, we can move between two points using a “short” path or “long” path.

If we consider the same point (red in our case) it means that the “short” path contains only red and the “long” path runs into all the colors as it traverses the color space.

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Adam Argyle published a very detailed guide on high-definition colors in CSS. I recommend reading it because you will find all the features we’re covering (this section in particular) to get more context on how everything comes together.

We can use the same technique to create a color wheel using a conic-gradient:

background: conic-gradient(in hsl longer hue,red 0 0); CodePen Embed Fallback

And while we are on the topic of CSS colors, I shared another fun trick that allows you to define an array of color values… yes, in CSS! And it only uses a single gradient as well.

Hover effects

Let’s do another exercise, this time working with hover effects. We tend to rely on pseudo-elements and extra elements when it comes to things like applying underlines and overlays on hover, and we tend to forget that gradients are equally, if not more, effective for getting the job done.

Case in point. Let’s use a single gradient to form an underline that slides on hover:

h3 { background: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0) no-repeat var(--p,0) 100%/var(--p, 0) .1em; transition: 0.4s, background-position 0s; } h3:hover { --p: 100%; } CodePen Embed Fallback

You likely would have used a pseudo-element for this, right? I think that’s probably how most people would approach it. It’s a viable solution but I find that using a gradient instead results in cleaner, more concise CSS.

You might be interested in another article I wrote for CSS-Tricks where I use the same technique to create a wide variety of cool hover effects.

CSS shapes

Creating shapes with gradients is my favorite thing to do in CSS. I’ve been doing it for what feels like forever and love it so much that I published a “Modern Guide for Making CSS Shapes” over at Smashing Magazine earlier this year. I hope you check it out not only to learn more tricks but to see just how many shapes we can create with such a small amount of code — many that rely only on a single CSS gradient.

Some of my favorites include zig-zag borders:

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…and “scooped” corners:

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…as well as sparkles:

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…and common icons like the plus sign:

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I won’t get into the details of creating these shapes to avoid making this article long and boring. Read the guide and visit my CSS Shape collection and you’ll have everything you need to make these, and more!

Border image tricks

Let’s do one more before we put a cap on this. Earlier this year, I discovered how awesome the CSS border-image property is for creating different kinds of decorations and shapes. And guess what? border-image limits us to using just one gradient, so we are obliged to follow that restriction.

Again, just one gradient and we get a bunch of fun results. I’ll drop in my favorites like I did in the last section. Starting with a gradient overlay:

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We can use this technique for a full-width background:

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…as well as heading dividers:

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…and even ribbons:

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All of these have traditionally required hacks, magic numbers, and other workarounds. It’s awesome to see modern CSS making things more effortless. Go read my article on this topic to find all the interesting stuff you can make using border-image.

Wrapping up

I hope you enjoyed this collection of “single-gradient” tricks. Most folks I know tend to use gradients to create, well, gradients. But as we’ve seen, they are more powerful and can be used for lots of other things, like drawing shapes.

I like to add a reminder at the end of an article like this that the goal is not to restrict yourself to using one gradient. You can use more! The goal is to get a better handle on how gradients work and push them in interesting ways — that, in turn, makes us better at writing CSS. So, go forth and experiment — I’d love to see what you make!

CSS Tricks That Use Only One Gradient originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

It’s always a gas when a good person doing good work gets a good deal. In this case, Jason’s viral WPGraphQL plugin has not only become a canonical WordPress plugin, but creator Jason Bahl is joining Automattic as well.

I’m linking this up because it’s notable for a few reasons:

• WPGraphQL is a must-have plugin for creating headless WordPress sites and making it a canonical plugin is WordPress making a big step in that direction.
• Jason is leaving WP Engine to join Automattic and we all know what a dumpster fire that relationship has become. (WP Engine also has a big foot in headless WordPress.)
• You might be hearing about canonical plugins for the first time.

Congrats, Jason! I didn’t know you were in Denver — maybe we’ll bump into each other and I can give you a well-deserved high-five. ✋

WPGraphQL Becomes a Canonical Plugin: My Move to Automattic originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

More times than I can count, while writing, I get myself into random but interesting topics with little relation to the original post. In the end, I have to make the simple but painful choice of deleting or archiving hours of research and writing because I know most people click on a post with a certain expectation of what they’ll get, and I know it isn’t me bombing them with unrelated rants about CSS.

This happened to me while working on Monday’s article about at-rules. All I did there was focus on a number of recipes to test browser support for CSS at-rules. In the process, I began to realize, geez we have so many new at-rules — I wonder how many of them are from this year alone. That’s the rabbit hole I found myself in once I wrapped up the article I was working on.

And guess what, my hunch was right: 2024 has brought more at-rules than an entire decade of CSS.

It all started when I asked myself why we got a selector() wrapper function for the @supports at-rule but are still waiting for an at-rule() version. I can’t pinpoint the exact reasoning there, but I’m certain there wasn’t much of a need to check the support of at-rules because, well, there weren’t that many of them — it’s just recently that we got a windfall of at-rules.

Some historical context

So, right around 1998 when the CSS 2 recommendation was released, @import and @page were the only at-rules that made it into the CSS spec. That’s pretty much how things remained until the CSS 2.1 recommendation in 2011 introduced @media. Of course, there were other at-rules like — @font-face, @namespace and @keyframes to name a few — that had already debuted in their own respective modules. By this time, CSS dropped semantic versioning, and the specification didn’t give a true picture of the whole, but rather individual modules organized by feature.

Random tangent: The last accepted consensus says we are at “CSS 3”, but that was a decade ago and some even say we should start getting into CSS 5. Wherever we are is beside the point, although it’s certainly a topic of discussion happening. Is it even useful to have a named version?

The @supports at-rule was released in 2011 in CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3 — Levels 1 and 2 don’t formally exist but refer to the original CSS 1 and 2 recommendations. We didn’t actually get support for it in most browsers until 2015, and at that time, the existing at-rules already had widespread support. The @supports was only geared towards new properties and values, designed to test browser support for CSS features before attempting to apply styles.

The numbers

As of today, we have a grand total of 18 at-rules in CSS that are supported by at least one major browser. If we look at the year each at-rule was initially defined in a CSSWG Working Draft, we can see they all have been published at a fairly consistent rate:

If we check the number of at-rules supported on each browser per year, however, we can see the massive difference in browser activity:

If we just focus on the last year a major browser shipped each at-rule, we will notice that 2024 has brought us a whopping seven at-rules to date!

Data collected from caniuse.

I like little thought experiments like this. Something you’re researching leads to researching about the same topic; out of scope, but tangentially related. It may not be the sort of thing you bookmark and reference daily, but it is good cocktail chatter. If nothing else, it’s affirming the feeling that CSS is moving fast, like really fast in a way we haven’t seen since CSS 3 first landed.

It also adds context for the CSS features we have — and don’t have. There was no at-rule() function initially because there weren’t many at-rules to begin with. Now that we’ve exploded with more new at-rules than the past decade combined, it may be no coincidence that just last week the Chrome Team updated the function’s status from New to Assigned!

One last note: the reason I’m even thinking about at-rules at all is that we’ve updated the CSS Almanac, expanding it to include more CSS features including at-rules. I’m trying to fill it up and you can always help by becoming a guest writer.

2024: More CSS At-Rules Than the Past Decade Combined originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

I sat down with Heydon Pickering in the most recent episode of the Smashing Hour. Full transparency: I was nervous as heck. I’ve admired Heydon’s work for years, and even though we run in similar circles, this was our first time meeting. You know how you build some things up in your mind and sorta psyche yourself out? Yeah, that.

Heydon is nothing short of a gentleman and, I’ll be darned, easy to talk to. As is the case with any Smashing Hour, there’s no script, no agenda, no nothing. We find ourselves getting into the weeds of accessibility testing and documentation — or the lack of it — before sliding into the stuff he’s really interested in and excited about today: styling sound. Dude pulled out a demo and walked me (and everyone else) through the basics of the Web Audio API and how he’s using it to visualize sounds in tons of groovy ways that I now want hooked up to my turntable somehow.

Smashing Hour With Heydon Pickering originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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 CSS3:

• Earliest draft specification was in 1999!
• Adoption began in 2011, when it was published as the W3C Recommendation.
• It’s been used ever since? That can’t be right…

CSS is certainly not stuck in 2011. Take a look at all the features added to CSS in the past five years (warning, scrolling animation ahead):

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(Courtesy of Alex Riviere)

Seems like this stems mainly from the discontinuation of version numbering for CSS. These days, we mostly reference newer CSS features by their individual specification level, such as Selectors Level 4 being the current Selectors specification, for example.

A far more general observation on the “progress” of CSS could be taking a look at features being implemented — things like Caniuse and Baseline are great for seeing when certain browsers implemented certain features. Similarly, the Interop Project is a group consisting of browsers figuring out what to implement next.

There are ongoing discussions about the “eras” of CSS, though, and how those may be a way of framing the way we refer to CSS features.

Chris posted about CSS4 here on CSS-Tricks (five years ago!), discussing how successful CSS3 was from a marketing perspective. Jen Simmons also started a discussion back in 2020 on the CSS Working Group’s GitHub about defining CSS4. Knowing that, are you at least somewhat surprised that we have blown right by CSS4 and are technically using CSS5?

The CSS-Next Community Group is leading the charge here, something that member Brecht de Ruyte introduced earlier this year at Smashing Magazine. The purpose of this group is to, well, determine what’s next for CSS! The group defines the CSS versions as:

• CSS3 (~2009-2012): Level 3 CSS specs as defined by the CSSWG
• CSS4 (~2013-2018): Essential features that were not part of CSS3, but are already a fundamental part of CSS.
• CSS5 (~2019-2024): Newer features whose adoption is steadily growing.
• CSS6 (~2025+): Early-stage features that are planned for future CSS.

Check out this slide deck from November 2023 detailing the need for defining stronger versioning. Their goals are clear in my opinion:

1. Help developers learn CSS.
2. Help educators teach CSS.
3. Help employers define modern web skil…
4. Help the community understand the progression of CSS capabilities over time.

Circling back around to the logo, I have to agree: Yes, it’s time for a change.

Back in August, Adam Argyle opened an issue on the CSS-Next project on GitHub to drum up ideas. The thread is active and ongoing, though appears to be honing in on a release candidate. Let’s take a look at some proposals!

Nils Binder, from 9elements, proposed this lovely design, riffing on the “cascade.” Note the river-like “S” shape flowing through the design.

Chris Kirk-Nielson pitched a neat interactive logo concept he put together a while back. The suggestion plays into the “CSS is Awesome” meme, where the content overflows the wrapper. While playful and recognizable, Nils raised an excellent point:

Regarding the reference to the ‘CSS IS AWESOME’ meme, I initially chuckled, of course. However, at the same time, the meme also represents CSS as something quirky, unpredictable, and full of bugs. I’m not sure if that’s the exact message that needs to be repeated in the logo. It feels like it reinforces the recurring ‘CSS is broken’ mantra. To exaggerate: CSS is subordinate to JS and somehow broken.

Wow, is this the end of an era for the familiar meme? 

It’s looking that way, as the current candidate builds off of Javi Aguilar’s proposal. Javi’s design is being iterated upon by the group, it’s shaping up and looks great hanging with friends:

Javi describes the design considerations in the thread. Personally, I’m a fan of the color choice, and the softer shape differentiates it from the more rigid JavaScript and Typescript logos.

As mentioned, the discussion is ongoing and the design is actively being worked on. You can check out the latest versions in Adam’s CodePen demo:

Or if checking out design files is more your speed, take a look in Figma.

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I think the thing that impresses me most about community initiatives like this is the collaboration involved. If you have opinions on the design of the logo, feel free to chime in on the discussion thread!

Once the versions are defined and the logo finalized, the only thing left to decide on will be a mascot for CSS. A chameleon? A peacock? I’m sure the community will choose wisely.

Searching for a New CSS Logo originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.