Css Tricks

A gem from Chris Ferdinandi that details how to use custom events to hook into Web Components. More importantly, Chris dutifully explains why custom events are a better fit than, say, callback functions.

With a typical JavaScript library, you pass callbacks in as part of the instantiate process. […] Because Web Components self-instantiate, though, there’s no easy way to do that.

There’s a way to use callback functions, just not an “easy” way to go about it.

JavaScript provides developers with a way to emit custom events that developers can listen for with the Element.addEventListener() method.

We can use custom events to let developers hook into the code that we write and run more code in response to when things happen. They provide a really flexible way to extend the functionality of a library or code base.

Don’t miss the nugget about canceling custom events!

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

Hey look at that, the State of CSS Survey for 2024 is open and taking submissions.

Quick Hit #11 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

You ever find yourself in bumper-to-bumper traffic? I did this morning on the way to work (read: whatever cafe I fancy). There’s a pattern to it, right? Stop, go, stop, go, stop… it’s almost rhythmic and harmonious in the most annoying of ways. Everyone in line follows the dance, led by some car upfront, each subsequent vehicle pressed right up to the rear of the next for the luxury of moving a few feet further before the next step.

Photo by Jakob Jin

Have you tried breaking the pattern? Instead of playing shadow to the car in front of me this morning, I allowed space between us. I’d gradually raise my right foot off the brake pedal and depress the gas pedal only once my neighboring car gained a little momentum. At that point, my car begins to crawl. And continue crawling. I rarely had to tap the brakes at all once I got going. In effect, I had sacrificed proximity for a smoother ride. I may not be traveling the “fastest” in line, but I was certainly gliding along with a lot less friction.

I find that many things in life are like that. Getting closest to anything comes with a cost, be it financial or consequence. Want the VIP ticket to a concert you’re stoked as heck about? Pony up some extra cash. Want the full story rather than a headline? Just enter your email address. Want up-to-the-second information in your stock ticker? Hand over some account information. Want access to all of today’s televised baseball games? Pick up an ESPN+ subscription.

Proximity and speed are the commodities, the products so to speak. Closer and faster are what’s being sold.

You may have run into the “law of diminishing returns” in some intro-level economics class you took in high school or college. It’s the basis for a large swath of economic theory but in essence, is the “too much of a good thing” principle. It’s what AMPM commercials have been preaching this whole time.

I’m embedding the clip instead of linking it up because it clearly illustrates the “problem” of having too many of what you want (or need). Dude resorted to asking two teens to reach into his front pocket for his wallet because his hands were full, creeper. But buy on, the commercial says, because the implication is that there’s never too much of a good thing, even if it ends in a not-so-great situation chockfull of friction.

The only and only thing I took away from physics in college — besides gravity force being 9.8 m/s2 — is that there’s no way to have bigger, cheaper, and faster at the same time. You can take two, but all three cannot play together. For example, you can have a spaceship that’s faster and cheaper, but chances are that it ain’t gonna be bigger than a typical spaceship. If you were to aim for bigger, it’d be a lot less cheap, not only for the extra size but also to make the dang heavy thing go as fast as possible. It’s a good rule in life. I don’t have proof of it, but I’d wager Mick Jagger lives by it, or at least did at one time.

Speed. Proximity. Faster and slower. Closer and further. I’m not going to draw any parallels to web development, UX design, or any other front-end thing. They’re already there.

The Intersection of Speed and Proximity originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

A client asked if we could mimic the “rubber band” scrolling behavior on many mobile devices. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. It’s a behavior that already exists and happens automatically in most browsers. In iOS Safari, for example, you’re allowed to scroll beyond the top or bottom edge of the viewport by a few hundred pixels, and letting go snaps the page back in place.

I had heard of some instances where someone might want to prevent the bounce from happening but no one had asked me to implement it, especially in a way that supports devices without a touch interface. I was actually a bit surprised there isn’t an existing CSS property for this. There’s the non-standard -webkit-overflow-scrolling property but that’s for a different type of “momentum” scrolling. Nor would I want to rely on a non-standard property that’s not on track to become part of the specifications.

OK, so what if we want to force this sort of rubber banding in our work? For starters, we’d need some sort of element acting as a container for content that requires scrolling. From there, we could reach for JavaScript, of course, but that involves adding scroll listeners or a combination of pointerDown, pointerUp, and pointerMove events, not to mention keeping track of positions, inertial movement, etc.

A CSS-only solution would be much more ideal.

Here is a container with a few child elements:

<div class="carousel"> <div class="slides"> <div class="slide">1</div> <div class="slide">2</div> <div class="slide">3</div> <div class="slide">4</div> <div class="slide">5</div> </div> </div>

Let’s get some baseline styles in place, specifically to create a situation where we’re guaranteed to overflow a parent container.

/* Parent container with fixed dimensions for overflow */ .carousel { width: 200px; height: 400px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: auto; } /* Wrapper for slides, stacked in a column */ .slides { display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-wrap: wrap; width: 100%; height: fit-content; } /* Each slide is the full width of the carousel */ .slide { width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 1; }

Let’s start by adding some vertical margins. If your container has only one long item, add it to the top and bottom of the child element. If the container has multiple children, you’ll want to add margin to the top of the first child element and the bottom of the last child element.

.carousel > .slides > .slide:first-child { margin-top: 100px; } .carousel > .slides > .slide:last-child { margin-bottom: 100px; }

Great! We can now scroll past the edges, but we need something to snap it back after the user lifts their finger or pointer. For this, we’ll need the scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-align properties

.carousel { scroll-snap-type: y mandatory; } .carousel > .slides > .slide { scroll-snap-align: start; } .carousel > .slides > .slide:first-child { margin-top: 100px; } .carousel > .slides > .slide:last-child { scroll-snap-align: end; margin-bottom: 100px; }

Note that the same applies to a horizontally scrolling element. For that, you’d change things up so that margin is applied to the element’s left and right edges instead of its top and bottom edges. You’ll also want to change the scroll-snap-type property’s value from y mandatory to x mandatory while you’re at it.

That’s really it! Here’s the final demo:

CodePen Embed Fallback

I know, I know. This isn’t some Earth-shattering or mind-blowing effect, but it does solve a very specific situation. And if you find yourself in that situation, now you have something in your back pocket to use.

Additional resources

• “The inside story of the iconic ‘rubber band’ effect that launched the iPhone” (Cult of Mac)
• “Six things I learnt about iOS Safari’s rubber band scrolling” (Special Agent Squeaky)
• “Scroll Bouncing On Your Websites” (Smashing Magazine)

Elastic Overflow Scrolling originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

A couple of weeks ago I was super excited about publishing my first CSS-Tricks post: “Letter Spacing is Broken. Forget about that though, what’s important is the post’s topic: letter spacing is broken and doesn’t work as the CSS Specification says it should. In a nutshell, instead of spacing the characters evenly, it leaves an unpleasant space at the end of the element.

While this inconsistency between the web and the spec is just a quirk for a Spanish/English speaker like me, for speakers of right-to-left (RTL) languages like Arabic or Hebrew, an annoying space is left at the start or end of a word. Firefox (Gecko) kinda fixes it and rearranges the unnecessary space at the end (in the reading order), but Google and Safari (Blink and Webkit) leave it at the start.

Of course, I wanted to demo this major pain point, but styling RTL content was beyond my CSS power. That’s when I found this life-saver guide by Ahmad Shadeed that covers every major aspect of styling RTL content on the web and best practices to easily internationalize an LTR webpage. A resource that, I think, is a must-read if you are interested in i18n and accessibility in the web.

I may have discovered warm water since this guide goes back to 2018, but I hope those like me who didn’t know about it have fun learning something new!

RTL Styling 101 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

I can’t say I would have ever expected to see Jeremy Keith performing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Maps”, but then again, I don’t know what I expected to happen at Frostapalooza.

The Event

Brad Frost, web designer, author of Atomic Design, and an absolute maniac on the bass, celebrated his birthday by putting together a one-night-only benefit concert featuring musical performances by himself and his talented family and friends.

Frostapalooza, held at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA, was an all-ages event where 100% of the proceeds are headed towards two great causes:

• NextStep Pittsburgh: Helping provide accessible rehabilitation for folks with spinal cord injuries and paralysis in Pittsburgh.
• Project Healthy Minds: Providing research and resources to help tackle mental health.

Performances

The variation of musical performances sprawled across the night, covering tracks by Fleetwood Mac, Radiohead, David Bowie and so much more, check out this setlist of all 31 tracks on Spotify.

I loved the performance of Pink Floyd’s classic song, “Money.” As a Floyd fan who will never get to see them live, this was easily the best rendition I could ask for, which included the full lineup of instrumental sections.

Brad was joined on stage by none other than CSS-Tricks founder, Chris Coyier. Chris picked banjo on a few songs, such as Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and The Band’s “The Weight,” both fantastic.

The stage background prominently displayed visuals out of CodePen demos made by CodePen community members during the set. Check out the Frostapalooza tag on CodePen to see everything that was projected.

Another favorite moment was Brad’s version of “Wake Up” by Arcade Fire, which felt like a perfectly matched song for the evening.

Musicians

If you haven’t caught on yet, many of the folks lending their musical talents to Frostapalooza also happen to be web designers and developers Brad has met and worked with during his career. At times it felt like the Wu-Tang Clan of CSS on stage.

Brad’s family and musicians from his other bands pitched in, such as Elby Brass. Ridiculously impressive! I had never seen a tuba-playing lead vocalist until this night.

You can see the full lineup on the event’s website. But I’ll drop a screenshot in here just for posterity.

Photos! Videos!

Mike Aparicio captured a great video of a group jam on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” that you’ve got to watch on YouTube. Brian Kardell nabbed this gem of Chris pickin’ on “The Weight”:

Party boy Brad Frost shared a bunch of other photos from the event in a Google Photos album.

The end

Plain and simple, this was a super fun night celebrating music and friends. Happy birthday, Brad, and thanks for putting on an awesome show!

Update (8/21/2024): You can check out Jeremy Keith’s post-event wrap, as well as Brad’s commentary on it.

On the Ground at Frostapalooza originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Every programming language has loops. Loops perform an operation (i.e., a chunk of work) a number of times, usually once for every item in an array or list, or to simply repeat an operation until a certain condition is met.

JavaScript in particular has quite a few different types of loops. I haven’t even used all of them, so for my own curiosity, I thought I’d do a high-level overview of them. And as it turns out, there are pretty good reasons I haven’t used at least a couple of the different types.

So, for now let’s spend a while exploring the different types of loops, what we can do with each of one, and why you might use one over another. (You’ll think that little play on words is absolutely hilarious by the end.)

The while and do...while loops

First up is the while loop. It’s the most basic type of loop and has the potential to be the easiest to read and the fastest in many cases. It’s usually used for doing something until a certain condition is met. It’s also the easiest way to make an infinite loop or a loop that never stops. There is also the do...while statement. Really, the only difference is that the condition is checked at the end versus the beginning of each iteration.

// remove the first item from an array and log it until the array is empty let queue1 = ["a", "b", "c"]; while (queue1.length) { let item = queue1.shift(); console.log(item); } // same as above but also log when the array is empty let queue2 = []; do { let item = queue2.shift() ?? "empty"; console.log(item); } while (queue2.length); The for loop

Next is the for loop. It should be the go to way to do something a certain number of times. If you need to repeat an operation, say, 10 times, then use a for loop instead. This particular loop may be intimidating to those new to programming, but rewriting the same loop in the while-style loop can help illustrate the syntax make it easier to stick in your mind.

// log the numbers 1 to 5 for (let i = 1; i <= 5; i++) { console.log(i); } // same thing but as a while loop let i = 1; // the first part of a for loop // the second while (i <= 5) { console.log(i); i++; // the third } ("end"); The for...of and for await...of loops

A for...of loop is the easiest way to loop through an array.

let myList = ["a", "b", "c"]; for (let item of myList) { console.log(item); }

They aren’t limited to arrays though. Technically they can iterate through anything that implements what is called an iterable protocol. There are a few built-in types that implement the protocol: arrays, maps, set, and string, to mention the most common ones, but you can implement the protocol in your own code. What you’d do is add a [Symbol.iterator] method to any object and that method should return an iterator. It’s a bit confusing, but the gist is that iterables are things with a special method that returns iterators; a factory method for iterators if you will. A special type of function called a generator is a function that returns both a iterable and iterator.

let myList = { *[Symbol.iterator]() { yield "a"; yield "b"; yield "c"; }, }; for (let item of myList) { console.log(item); }

There is the async version of all the things I just mentioned: async iterables, async iterators, and async generators. You’d use an async iterable with for await...of.

async function delay(ms) { return new Promise((resolve) => { setTimeout(resolve, ms); }); } // this time we're not making an iterable, but a generator async function* aNumberAMinute() { let i = 0; while (true) { // an infinite loop yield i++; // pause a minute await delay(60_000); } } // it's a generator, so we need to call it ourselves for await (let i of aNumberAMinute()) { console.log(i); // stop after one hour if (i >= 59) { break; } }

One unobvious thing about for await...of statement is that you can use it with non-async iterables and it will work just fine. The reverse, however, is not true; you can’t use async iterables with the for...of statement.

The forEach and map loops

While these are not technically loops per se, you can use them to iterate over a list.

Here is the thing about the forEach method. Historically it was much slower than using a for loop. I think in some cases that may not be true anymore, but if performance is a concern, then I would avoid using it. And now that we have for...of I’m not sure there is much reason to use it. I guess the only reason that it still may come up is if you have a function ready to use as the callback, but you could easily just call that same function from inside the body of for...of.

forEach also receives the index for each item though, so that may be a thing you need too. Ultimately, the decision to use it will probably come down to whether any other code you’re working with uses it, but I personally would avoid using it if I’m writing something new.

let myList = ["a", "b", "c"]; for (let item of myList) { console.log(item); } // but maybe if I need the index use forEach ["a", "b", "c"].forEach((item, index) => { console.log(`${index}: ${item}`); });

Meanwhile, map essentially converts one array into another. It still has the same performance impact that forEach has, but it is a bit nicer to read than the alternative. It’s certainly subjective though, and just like with forEach you’ll want to do what the rest of your other code is doing. You see it a ton in React and React-inspired libraries as the primary way to loop through an array and output a list of items within JSX.

function MyList({items}) { return ( <ul> {items.map((item) => { return <li>{item}</li>; })} </ul> ); } The for...in loop

This list of loops in JavaScript wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the for...in statement because it can loop through the fields of an object. It visits fields that are inherited through the object’s prototype chain too, though, and I’ve honestly always avoided it for that reason.

That said, if you have an object literal, then for...in might be a viable way to iterate through the keys of that object. Also it’s worth noting that if you’ve been programming JavaScript for a long time, you may remember that the order of keys use to be inconsistent between browsers, but now the order is consistent. Any key that could be an array index (i.e., positive integers) will be first in ascending order, and then everything else in the order as authored.

let myObject = { a: 1, b: 2, c: 3, }; for (let k in myObject) { console.log(myObject[k]); } Wrapping up

Loops are something that many programmers use every day, though we may take them for granted and not think about them too much.

But when you step back and look at all of the ways we have to loop through things in JavaScript, it turns out there are several ways to do it. Not only that, but there are significant — if not nuanced — differences between them that can and will influence your approach to scripts.

All About JavaScript Loops originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

I was just going over the latest CSSWG minutes (you can subscribe to them at W3C.org) and came across a few interesting nuggets I wanted to jot down for another time. The group discussed the CSS Values, CSS Easing, and Selectors modules, but what really caught my eye was adding triggered delays to CSS for things like hover, long taps, and focus states.

The idea stems from an OpenUI proposal, the same group we can thank for raising things like the Popover API and customizable select element. The concept, if I understand it right, is that anytime someone hovers, taps, or focuses on, say, a <button> for a certain amount of time, we can invoke some sort of thing. A tooltip is the perfect illustration. Hovering over the trigger element, the reasoning goes, is an expression of interest and as web authors, we can do something with that interest, like displaying a tooltip.

Whoa, right?! There’s long been chatter about CSS encroaching on JavaScript territory (isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?). Firing events in response to interaction is quite literally the only thing I use JavaScript for. There’s no mistake about that in the CSSWG, as documented in the minutes:

So. Does this belong in CSS? Or should it be elsewhere? Does the approach make sense? Are there better ideas? Most interested in the last.

[…]

Other question; does this belong in CSS or HTML… maybe this is just a javascript feature? In JS you can determine MQ state and change things so it wouldn’t necessarily be in CSS.

And shortly later:

As you were talking; one thing that I kept thinking of; should developers be customizing the delay at all? Original use case for delay is that hover shouldn’t be instant. But if we don’t allow for customizing we can align to platform delay lengths.

But there’s an excellent point to be made about the way many of us are already doing this with CSS animations (animation-delay) and transitions (transition-delay). Sometimes even applying those globally with the Universal Selector or a prefers-* query.

Things get even hairier when considering how values are defined for this. Are they explicit delays (800ms), generic keywords (none/short/medium/long), a custom property, a pseudo-class… something else? I’m glad there’re incredibly smart folks noodling on this stuff.

I think here it would be good to go with time values. CSS is a good place to put it. We have all the ergonomics. The right declarative place to put it.

Whatever the eventual case may be:

I think this sounds reasonable and I’d like to explore it. Unsure if this is the exact shape, but this space seems useful to me.

CSSWG Minutes Telecon (2024-08-14) originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Yes, yes. Functionally, they are different. But heck if I didn’t know about the wacky thresholds until Jens Oliver Meiert tooted a pair of quick polls.

According to the HTML Standard:

8. If the current cell has a colspan attribute, then parse that attribute’s value, and let colspan be the result.
   If parsing that value failed, or returned zero, or if the attribute is absent, then let colspan be 1, instead.
   If colspan is greater than 1000, let it be 1000 instead.
9. If the current cell has a rowspan attribute, then parse that attribute’s value, and let rowspan be the result.
   If parsing that value failed or if the attribute is absent, then let rowspan be 1, instead.
   If rowspan is greater than 65534, let it be 65534 instead.

I saw the answers in advance and know I’d have flubbed rowspan. Apparently, 1000 table columns are plenty of columns to span at once, while 65534 is the magic number for clamping how many rows we can span at a time. Why is the sweet spot for rowspan 6,4543 spans greater than colspan? There are usually good reasons for these things.

What that reason is, darned if I know, but now I have a little nugget for cocktail chatter in my back pocket.

How are the `colspan` and `rowspan` attributes different? originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Free e-book from Jens Oliver Meiert that’ll bore you to death in the best way: Rote Learning HTML & CSS

Quick Hit #11 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Killed by Google is called a “graveyard” but I also see it as a resume in experimentation.

Quick Hit #10 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Modern CSS keeps giving us a lot of new, easier ways to solve old problems, but often the new features we’re getting don’t only solve old problems, they open up new possibilities as well.

Container queries are one of those things that open up new possibilities, but because they look a lot like the old way of doing things with media queries, our first instinct is to use them in the same way, or at least a very similar way.

When we do that, though, we aren’t taking advantage of how “smart” container queries are when compared to media queries!

Because of how important media queries were for ushering in the era of responsive web design I don’t want to say anything mean about them… but media queries are dumb. Not dumb in terms of the concept, but dumb in that they don’t know very much. In fact, most people assume that they know more than they do.

Let’s use this simple example to illustrate what I mean:

html { font-size: 32px; } body { background: lightsalmon; } @media (min-width: 35rem) { body { background: lightseagreen; } }

What would the viewport size be for the background color to change? If you said 1120px wide — which is the product of multiplying 35 by 32 for those who didn’t bother doing the math — you aren’t alone in that guess, but you’d also be wrong.

Remember when I said that media queries don’t know very much? There are only two things they do know:

• the size of the viewport, and
• the browser’s font size.

And when I say the browser’s font size, I don’t mean the root font size in your document, which is why 1120px in the above example was wrong.

The font size they look at is the initial font size coming from the browser before any values, including the user agent styles, are applied. By default, that’s 16px, though users can change that in their browser settings.

And yes, this is on purpose. The media query specification says:

Relative length units in media queries are based on the initial value, which means that units are never based on results of declarations.

This might seem like a strange decision, but if it didn’t work that way, what would happen if we did this:

html { font-size: 16px; } @media (min-width: 30rem) { html { font-size: 32px; } }

If the media query looked at the root font-size (like most assume it does), you’d run into a loop when the viewport would get to 480px wide, where the font-size would go up in size, then back down over and over again.

Container queries are a lot smarter

While media queries have this limitation, and for good reason, container queries don’t have to worry about this type of problem and that opens up a lot of interesting possibilities!

For example, let’s say we have a grid that should be stacked at smaller sizes, but three columns at larger sizes. With media queries, we sort of have to magic number our way to the exact point where this should happen. Using a container query, we can determine the minimum size we want a column to be, and it’ll always work because we’re looking at the container size.

That means we don’t need a magic number for the breakpoint. If I want three columns with a minimum size of 300px, I know I can have three columns when the container is 900px wide. If I did that with a media query, it wouldn’t work, because when my viewport is 900px wide, my container is, more often than not, smaller than that.

But even better, we can use any unit we want as well, because container queries, unlike media queries, can look at the font size of the container itself.

To me, ch is perfect for this sort of thing. Using ch I can say “when I have enough room for each column to be a minimum of 30 characters wide, I want three columns.”

We can do the math ourselves here like this:

.grid-parent { container-type: inline-size; } .grid { display: grid; gap: 1rem; @container (width > 90ch) { grid-template-columns: repeat(3, 1fr); } }

And this does work pretty well, as you can see in this example.

CodePen Embed Fallback

As another bonus, thanks to Miriam Suzanne, I recently learned that you can include calc() inside media and container queries, so instead of doing the math yourself, you can include it like this: @container (width > calc(30ch * 3)) as you can see in this example:

CodePen Embed Fallback A more practical use case

One of the annoying things about using container queries is having to have a defined container. A container cannot query itself, so we need an extra wrapper above the element we want to select with a container query. You can see in the examples above that I needed a container on the outside of my grid for this to work.

Even more annoying is when you want grid or flex children to change their layout depending on how much space they have, only to realize that this doesn’t really work if the parent is the container. Instead of having that grid or flex container be the defined container, we end up having to wrap each grid or flex item in a container like this:

<div class="grid"> <div class="card-container"> <div class="card"> </div> <div class="card-container"> <div class="card"> </div> <div class="card-container"> <div class="card"> </div> </div> .card-container { container-type: inline-size; }

It’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things, but it is kind of annoying.

Except there are ways around this!

For example, if you’re using repeat(auto-fit, ...) you can use the main grid as the container!

.grid-auto-fit { display: grid; gap: 1rem; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(min(30ch, 100%)), 1fr); container-type: inline-size; }

Knowing that the minimum size of a column is 30ch, we can leverage that info to restyle individual grid items depending on how many columns we have:

/* 2 columns + gap */ @container (width > calc(30ch * 2 + 1rem)) { ... } /* 3 columns + gaps */ @container (width > calc(30ch * 3 + 2rem)) { ... }

I’ve used this in this example to change the styles of the first child in my grid based on whether we have one, two, or three columns.

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And while changing the background color of something is great for demos, we can, of course, do much more with this:

CodePen Embed Fallback The downside to this approach

The only downside I’ve found using this approach is that we can’t use custom properties for the breakpoints, which would really improve the DX of this.

That should eventually change considering custom media queries are in the spec editor’s draft of the Media Queries Level 5 specifications, but its been in there for a while with no movement from any browsers, so it might be a long time before we can use them.

And while my opinion is that having custom properties for these would both make them more readable and easier to update, it opens up enough possibilities that it’s still worth it without them.

What about flexbox?

With flexbox, the flex items are what define the layout, so it’s a little strange in that the sizes we apply on the items are what are important in the breakpoints.

It can still work, but there is a big issue that can arise if you do this with flexbox. Before we look at the issue, here is a quick example of how we can get this working with flexbox:

.flex-container { display: flex; gap: 1rem; flex-wrap: wrap; container-type: inline-size; } .flex-container > * { /* full-width at small sizes */ flex-basis: 100%; flex-grow: 1; /* when there is room for 3 columns including gap */ @container (width > calc(200px * 3 + 2rem)) { flex-basis: calc(200px); } }

In this case, I used px to show it works as well, but you could use any unit there, as I did with the grid examples.

This might look like something you can use a media query for as well — you can use the calc() in them too! — but this would only work in one if the parent has a width that matches the viewport width, which most of the time isn’t the case.

CodePen Embed Fallback This breaks if the flex items have padding

A lot of people don’t realize it, but the flexbox algorithm doesn’t take padding or borders into account, even if you change your box-sizing. If you have padding on your flex items, you’ll basically have to magic number your way to getting it to work.

Here’s an example where I added some padding but I haven’t changed anything else, and you’ll notice one of those awkward two-columns with one stretched on the bottom layouts at one point:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Because of this, I do generally find myself using this type of approach more often with grid than flexbox, but there are definitely situations where it can still work.

Like before, because we’re aware of how many columns we have, we can leverage that to make more dynamic and interesting layouts depending on the space available for a given element, or elements.

CodePen Embed Fallback Opening up some interesting possibilities

I’ve only started playing around with this type of thing, and I’ve found that it’s opened up some new possibilities that we never had with media queries, and that makes me excited to see what else is possible!

“Smart” Layouts With Container Queries originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

“This isn’t a website. Or even a blog. It’s a conversation.”

That’s the idea! Jay Hoffman and I’ve been chatting a long time now, back since he began writing a series on web history. It’s easy-going talking with someone with all that knowledge about the web’s interesting nooks and crannies.

Anyway, I always look forward to those chats. Sometimes, though, one of can’t make it for whatever reason. At the time, we’d been talking about different approaches to blogging and were particularly keen on the whole “digital garden” concept. We weren’t going to plant one or anything, but that inspired us to move our long-running conversation to a blog — you know, one of the best mediums ever in web history.

We didn’t want something linear in the sense that the blog is an archive of posts in chronological order. No, instead we wanted it to start as a seed that grows into a vine that twists and turns at different bends.

That’s where the “Dialogues” idea came in. It’s all Jay’s, really. He starts by asking me a question that I answer in the form of a post with a follow-up question that he, in turn, answers in a post with a follow-up question, and on and on.

The first question is already up there, and it’s a nice little ice breaker: What was the moment the web clicked for you? I had to take a few moments to let that one sink in and reflect on myself as a web user from 30 years ago. What a great little mind exercise and thing to talk about!

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

You might recall that Alvaro suggests bumping up font-size to 1.25rem from the default user agent size of 16px. Sebastian Laube pokes at that:

I wouldn’t adopt Alvaro’s suggestion without further ado, as I would waste so much space on a smartphone, for example, and many users would probably be irritated by the large font.

I set a font size of 1.2rem from a certain viewport size. But this also has to be done carefully, because then grey areas arise in which media queries suddenly fall back into another area…

I personally agree with Alvaro that the default 16px size is too small. That’s just how I feel as someone who is uncomfortably close to wearing the bottoms of actual Coke bottles to see anything clearly on a screen.

On the flip side, I professionally agree with Sebastian, not that many users would probably be irritated by the large font, but to openly question an approach rather than adopting someone else’s approach wholesale based on a single blog post. It may very well be that a font-size bump is the right approach. Everything is relative, after all, and we ought to be listening to the people who use the thing we’re making for decisions like this.

The much bigger question is the one Sebastian poses right at the end there:

Should browsers perhaps use a larger font size on large screens from the outset if the user does not specify otherwise? Or do we need an information campaign to make them aware that they should check their system settings or set a different default font size in the browser?

Fantastic, right?! I’m honestly unsure where I’d draw the viewport breakpoint for 16px being either too large or small and where to start making adjustments. Is 16px the right default at any viewport size? Or perhaps user agents ought to consider a fluid type implementation that defines a default font scale and range of sizes instead? It’s great food for thought.

font-size Limbo originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.