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CSS :has() Interactive Guide

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!

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.

An example of an HTML Web Component | Go Make Things

Another example of an HTML web component from Chris, who concludes:

Web Components are rapidly becoming my preferred way to add progressive enhancement to HTML elements.

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.

dbohdan/classless-css: A list of classless CSS themes/frameworks with screenshots

A collection of stylesheets that don’t use class selectors. Think of them as alternatives to default user-agent stylesheets.

Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more | WebKit

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.

Here’s what I didn’t know about :where() - Manuel Matuzović

I feel like I’m starting to understand how the CSS :where pseudo-class works and why it’s useful. The cogs are slowly turning in my brain.

Scope Proposal & Explainer

This detailed proposal from Miriam for scoping CSS is well worth reading—it makes a lot of sense to me.

No, Utility Classes Aren’t the Same As Inline Styles | frontstuff

This is supposed to be a defence of utility classes …but it’s actually a great explanation of why classes in general are a great mechanism for styling.

I don’t think anyone has ever seriously suggested using inline styles—the actual disagreement is about how ludicrously rigid and wasteful the class names dictated by something like Tailwind are. When people criticise those classes they aren’t advocating for inline styles—they’re advocating for better class names and making more use of the power of the class selector in CSS, not less.

Anyway, if you removed every instance of the word “utility” from this article, it would still work.

Can I :has()

This would be such a great addition to CSS—a parent/ancestor selector!

With the combined might of :has(), :not(), nth-child(), and calc(), CSS has become a powerful language for specifying rules to account for all kinds of situations.

CSS { In Real Life } | Quick Tip: Style Pseudo-elements with Javascript Using Custom Properties

Oh, this is smart! You can’t target pseudo-elements in JavaScript, but you can use custom properties as a proxy instead.

Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence (Interconnected)

I love, love, love this experiment from Matt—messin’ around in websites!

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.

Standardizing `select` And Beyond: The Past, Present And Future Of Native HTML Form Controls — Smashing Magazine

While a handful of form controls can be easily styled by CSS, like the button element, most form controls fall into a bucket of either requiring hacky CSS or are still unable to be styled at all by CSS.

Despite form controls no longer taking a style or technical dependency on the operating system and using modern rendering technology from the browser, developers are still unable to style some of the most used form control elements such as select. The root of this problem lies in the way the specification was originally written for form controls back in 1995.

Stephanie goes back in time to tell the history of form controls on the web, and how that history has led to our current frustrations:

The current state of working with controls on the modern web is that countless developer hours are being lost to rewriting controls from scratch, as custom elements due to a lack of flexibility in customizability and extensibility of native form controls. This is a massive gap in the web platform and has been for years. Finally, something is being done about it.

Amen!

CSS Stats

A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:

CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.

What is CSS Specificity? Sarah Chima - Front-End Developer

An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.

Striking a Balance Between Native and Custom Select Elements | CSS-Tricks

I think this a solution worthy of Solomon. In this case, the Gordian knot is the select element and its inevitable recreation in order to style it.

What if we instead deliver a native select by default and replace it with a more aesthetically pleasing one if possible? That’s where the “hybrid” select idea comes into action. It’s “hybrid” because it consists of two selects, showing the appropriate one at the right moment:

A native select, visible and accessible by default

A custom select, hidden until it’s safe to be interacted with a mouse

The implementation uses a genius combination of a hover media query and an adjacent sibling selector in CSS. It has been tested on a number of device/platform/browser combinations but more tests are welcome!

What I love about this solution is that it satisfies the stakeholders insisting on a custom component but doesn’t abandon all the built-in accessibility that you get from native form controls.

Link tags: select

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