Link tags: cascade

What is Utility-First CSS?: HeydonWorks

Heydon does a very good job of explaining why throwing away the power of selectors makes no sense.

Utility-first detractors complain a lot about how verbose this is and, consequently, how ugly. And it is indeed. But you’d forgive it that if it actually solved a problem, which it doesn’t. It is unequivocally an inferior way of making things which are alike look alike, as you should. It is and can only be useful for reproducing inconsistent design, wherein all those repeated values would instead differ.

He’s also right on the nose in explaining why something as awful at Tailwind could get so popular:

But CSS isn’t new, it’s only good. And in this backwards, bullshit-optimized economy of garbage and nonsense, good isn’t bad enough.

CSS Nesting and the Cascade | WebKit

As well as a very welcome announcement, Jen has a really good question for you about nesting in CSS.

If you have an opinion on the answer, please chime in.

Modern CSS in Real Life - Chris Coyier

This is a terrrific presentation by Chris, going through some practical implementations of modern CSS: logical properties, viewport units, grid, subgrid, container queries, cascade layers, new colour spaces, and view transitions.

Grease

Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless.

Interestingly, this starter kit uses cascade layers for managing CSS.

Modern alternatives to BEM - daverupert.com

Dave rounds up some of the acronymtastic ways of scoping your CSS now that we’ve got a whole new toolkit at our disposal.

If your goal is to reduce specificity, new native CSS tools make reducing specificity a lot easier. You can author your CSS with near-zero specificity and even control the order in which your rules cascade.

The Future of CSS: Cascade Layers (CSS @layer) – Bram.us

This is a really in-depth explanation from Bramus of the upcoming @layer rules in CSS, from the brilliant minds of Miriam, fantasai and Tab.

Basically, you’ll be able to scope styles, and you get to define the context for that scoping. So all those CSS-in-JS folks who don’t appreciate the cascade will have a mechanism to get encapsulated styles.

I can see this being very handy for big complex codebases with lots of people on the team.

Should DevTools teach the CSS cascade?

In a break with Betteridge’s law, I think the answer here is “yes.”

What Makes CSS Hard To Master - Tim Severien

CSS is simple, but not easy.

If we, as a community, start to appreciate the complexity of writing CSS, perhaps we can ask for help instead of blaming the language when we’re confused or stuck. We might also stop looking down on CSS specialists.

CSS Custom Properties Fail Without Fallback · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Matthias has a good solution for dealing with the behaviour of CSS custom properties I wrote about: first set your custom properties with the fallback and then use feature queries (@supports) to override those values.

Hybrid positioning with CSS variables and max() – Lea Verou

Yet another clever technique from Lea. But I’m also bookmarking this one because of something she points out about custom properties:

The browser doesn’t know if your property value is valid until the variable is resolved, and by then it has already processed the cascade and has thrown away any potential fallbacks.

That explains an issue I was seeing recently! I couldn’t understand why an older browser wasn’t getting the fallback I had declared earlier in the CSS. Turns out that custom properties mess with that expectation.

CUBE CSS - Piccalilli

I really, really like Andy’s approach here:

The focus of the methodology is utilising the power of CSS and the web platform as a whole, with some added controls and structures that help to keep things a bit more maintainable and predictable. The end-goal is shipping as little CSS as possible—leaning heavily into progressive enhancement and modern techniques.

If you use the cascade for everything, you’re going to run into trouble. But equally, micro-managing styles on every element will also get you into trouble. I think Andy’s found a really great sweet spot here that gets the balance just right.

CUBE CSS in essence, is a progressive enhancement approach, vs a fight against the grain of CSS or a pixel-pushing your project to within an inch of its life approach.

Yes! It feels very “webby” to me.

The CSS Cascade

This is a wonderful interactive explanation of the way CSS hierarchy works—beautiful!

I <3 the cascade! | Go Make Things

Chris makes the valid observation that JavaScript programmers who bemoan the “global scope” of CSS are handily forgetting that JavaScript also has global scope by default.

JS is also global by default. We use IIFEs and wrapper functions to add scope.

And for all this talk about CSS being global, you can actually scope styles when you need to. It’s more-or-less the same way you do it in JavaScript.

The CSS Mindset | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

This post absolutely nails what’s special about CSS …and why supersmart programmers might have trouble wrapping their head around it:

Other programming languages often work in controlled environments, like servers. They expect certain conditions to be true at all times, and can therefore be understood as concrete instructions as to how a program should execute.

CSS on the other hand works in a place that can never be fully controlled, so it has to be flexible by default.

Max goes on to encapsulate years of valuable CSS learnings into some short and snappy pieces of advices:

• Everything is a rectangle
• The Cascade is your Friend
• As much as necessary, as little as possible
• Shorthands have long effects
• Always Be Flexible
• Context is Key
• Content will change
• Find Patterns and re-use them
• Use consistent Names

No matter what your level of CSS knowledge, this post has something for you—highly recommended!

Difference between currentColor & Custom Properties | Mike Riethmuller

I had to read through this twice, but I think I get it now (I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer). Very useful if you’re doing theming in CSS.

A Tale of Two Buttons

In defence of the cascade (especially now that we’ve got CSS custom properties).

I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.

Remember, every time you set a property in CSS you are in fact overriding something (even if it’s just the default user agent styles). In other words, CSS code is mostly expressing exceptions to a default design.

Resilient, Declarative, Contextual

This is really good breakdown of what’s different about CSS (compared to other languages).

These differences may feel foreign, but it’s these differences that make CSS so powerful. And it’s my suspicion that developers who embrace these things, and have fully internalized them, tend to be far more proficient in CSS.

CSS Inheritance, The Cascade And Global Scope: Your New Old Worst Best Friends – Smashing Magazine

A really terrific piece by Heydon that serves as a rousing defence of the cascade in CSS. It’s set up in opposition to methodologies like BEM (and there’s plenty of back’n’forth in the comments), but the truth is that every project is different so the more approaches you have in your toolkit, the better. For many projects, something like BEM is a good idea. For others, not so much.

Funnily enough, I’ve been working something recently where I’ve been embracing the approach that Heydon describes—although, to be fair, it’s a personal project where I don’t have to think about other developers touching the HTML or CSS.

Sebastian Ly Serena

The greatest form ever made.