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 terrific interactive explainer!
Michelle has written a detailed practical guide to container queries here.
This extract from Deb Chachra’s new book confirms that it’s a must-read. The writing fairly sings with infectious enthusiasm!
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.
Instead of thinking about responsive design in terms of media queries, I like to think of responsive design in these categories.
- Responsive to the content
- Responsive to the viewport
- Responsive to the container
- Responsive to the user preferences
James describes his process for designing fluid grid layouts, which very much involves working with the grain of the web but against the grain of our design tools:
In 2022 our design tools are still based around fixed-size artboards, while we’re trying to design products which scale gracefully to suit any screen.
A terrific tour of just some of the fantastic ways you can use :has() in CSS.
The section on using it with sibling selectors blew my mind:
How often have you wanted to adjust the margins on a headline based on the element following it? Now it’s easy. This code allows us to select any h2 with a p immediately after it.
h2:has(+ p) { margin-bottom: 0; }Amazing.
The algorithm I’m going after is pretty simple: If the grid of items has an odd number of items, then make the first item full-width. But CSS can’t do logic… right? Well… hold my proverbial beer.
To complement her talk at Beyond Tellerrand, Stephanie goes through some of the powerful CSS features that enable intrinsic web design. These are all great tools for the declarative design approach I was talking about:
I like this high-level view of the state of CSS today. There are two main takeaways:
This is exactly the direction we should be going in! More and more power from the native web technologies (while still remaining learnable), with less and less reliance on tooling. For CSS, the tools have been like polyfills that we can now start to remove.
Alas, while the same should be true of JavaScript (there’s so much you can do in native JavaScript now), people seem to have tied their entire identities to the tooling they use.
They could learn a thing or two from the trajectory of CSS: treat your frameworks as cattle, not pets.
This is how you write up a technique! Cassie takes an SVG pattern she used on the Clearleft “services” page and explains it in step-by-step detail, complete with explanatory animated diagrams.
Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components.
This is a useful technique that future me is almost certainly going to need at some point.
When you’ve got a single centered column but you want something (like an image) to break out and span the full width.
A useful resource for CSS grid. It’s basically the spec annoted with interactive examples.
Progressive Enhancement allows us to use the latest and greatest features HTML, CSS and JavaScript offer us, by providing a basic, but robust foundation for all.
Some great practical examples of progressive enhancement on one website:
type="module" to enhance a form with JavaScript,picture element to provide webp images in HTML.All of those enhancements work great in modern browsers, but the underlying functionality is still available to a browser like Opera Mini on a feature phone.