Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.
The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.
Here’s a nifty demo of popover but it’s not for what we’d traditionally consider a modal dialog.
Can we please stop adding complexity to our systems just so we can do it in JavaScript? If you can do it without JavaScript, you probably should. Tools shouldn’t add complexity.
You don’t need a framework to render static content to the end user. Stop creating complex solutions to simple problems.
Here’s Paul’s take on this year’s CSS Day. He’s not an easy man to please, but the event managed to impress even him.
As CSS Day celebrates its milestone anniversary, I was reminded how lucky we are to have events that bring together two constituent parties of the web: implementors and authors (with Sara Soueidan’s talk about the relationship between CSS and accessibility reminding us of the users we ultimately build for). My only complaint is that there are not more events like this; single track, tight subject focus (and amazing catering).
Hallelujah! We’re finally getting our two wishes for CSS animations and transitions:
- Animating to and from
display: none;for the sake of enter/exit animations.- Animating to and from the intrinsic size of an element (such as
height: auto;).
Speaking of zines, I really like Benjamin’s ideas about a web-first indie web zine: using print stylesheets with personal websites to make something tangible but webby.
A proposal to retroactively classify additions to CSS in order to put more meat on the bones of the term “modern CSS”.
I wasn’t able to tune into this live (“tune in?” what century is this?) but I’ve enjoyed catching up with the great talks like:
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
Rachel responds to Jen’s recent post with the counter-argument; why masonry should be separate from grid.
I’m not entirely convinced. We heard performance issues as a reason why we could never have container queries or :has, but here we are. And the syntax for a separate masonry spec borrows so heavily from grid that it smells of redundancy.
Laying out sheet music with CSS grid—sounds extreme until you see it abstracted into a web component.
We need fluid and responsive music rendering for the web!
This is a wonderful in-depth article by Jen, with lots of great demos.
She makes a very strong case for masonry layouts being part of the grid spec (I’m convinced!). If you have strong feelings one way or the other, get involved
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
This is a great thought exercise in progressive enhancement …that Scott then turns into a real exercise!
Adam makes a very good point here: the term “vertical rhythm” is quite chauvanistic, unconciously defaulting to top-to-bottom writing modes; the term “logical rhythm” is more universal (and scalable).
It’s like CSS exists in some bizarre quantum state; somehow both too complex to use, yet too simple to take seriously, all at once.
In many ways, CSS has greater impact than any other language on a user’s experience, which often directly influences success. Why, then, is its role so belittled?
Writing CSS seems to be regarded much like taking notes in a meeting, complete with the implicit sexism and devaluation of the note taker’s importance in the room.
This isn’t just a great explanation of :has(), it’s an excellent way of understanding selectors in general. I love how the examples are interactive!
Here’s a taste of what Rich will be delivering at Patterns Day on Thursday—can’t wait!
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.