Recently I came across a CodePen demo by a developer/engineer named Jane that was Tweeted out by Šime Vidas. The demo has a neat collection of HTML and CSS tricks rolled into one that I thought was worth examining in detail.

The page displays a secret message based on specific text input. Ok, that’s no big deal, right? Well this is done using pure HTML and CSS – no JavaScript. I’ve seen stuff like this before, but I thought it would be cool to break down exactly how this works. There are a few notable things happening in the code so I’ll break down each of the parts.

The post Detecting Specific Text Input with HTML and CSS appeared first on Impressive Webs.

Over the last 10 years or so I've done a ton of technical editing work. I've helped with CSS articles and CSS books for various online and print publications. One of the things that comes up often when I make suggestions is the difference between a CSS rule and a CSS ruleset.

In most cases, almost all authors use the term "CSS rules" to refer to the blocks of CSS that include the selector and the CSS declarations. Is this correct?

The post CSS Rules vs. CSS Rulesets appeared first on Impressive Webs.

We're talking CSS-in-JS, Token CSS, Matuzo being suspended from Twitter, trying out Mastodon, testing out stable diffusion, stories on the web, and Jake Albaugh's new social network.

Austin power updates, what do you need if you want to build a new JavaScript framework, and what do we hope CSS brings in 2023?

When will AI be able to tell you the risk / reward of cleaning up trees? Are conferences back? Bringing fidgets to the web, internet as an anxiety machine, and Chris is working on talk on modern CSS in real life.

Is there still any value in specializing in front-of-the-frontend dev? Would you ever use the dialog element for a mobile navigation? Why did CodePen decide to use Go for its GraphQL server?

After a brief visit from Hip Hop Dad Dave, we're talking cascade layers updates, block link practices, search element getting dropped, how to use cite, emoji list accessibility, scrollbar state, and trigonometric functions in CSS.

What if Taylor Swift lyrics hold the answers to web dev questions? Podcast app thoughts, using Cloudflare Zaraz, what we're excited about with CSS, Arc browser updates, and are we even developers or are we specialized systems whisperers?

Estelle Weyl and Eric Meyer join us to talk about the 5th edition of their book, CSS: The Definitive Guide. We talk about some of CSS' biggest blunders, custom scroll bars, single line comments, shorthand in CSS, useless CSS trivia, and how to get started learning CSS in 2023.

Bluesky adds first class support for urls as a username, text-wrap pretty update, sqwunching text update, should CSS spit out errors, anchor functionality, what does the edge mean, eSports and bowling, how to test websites on slower CPUs, and what does proxy or reverse proxy mean?

Have you ever been an auctioneer? Sometimes when God closes a shed, he opens a sauna. Dave's working on the one day build theory, how to market with fake data, an update on the Discord, marketing with a spicy slug, what we want to see next in CSS, and thoughts on component libraries.

We're talking the State of CSS Survey, 2023 Edition, with Chen Hui Jing. What was it like helping develop the survey? A bit of follow up on regions, the benefits of being able to tell the browser what you want, language issues in developing and understanding CSS, the struggle for non-majority users, CSS frameworks, and more.

Getting tripped up on audio at conferences, announcing the ShopTalk Show Lifetime Plan, some Once pricing #hotdrama, remembering Molly Holzschlag, web components, Luro launch day thoughts, and a question about using a normalize or sanitize in 2023 prompts a run through of Andy Bell's Modern CSS Reset.

A quick bit of union news follow up, CSS function round up, Read It Later inside Feedbin, fun uses for a Stream Deck+, how to turn up the money dial in your own business, and having the audacity to call yourself a publisher.

Miriam Suzanne stops by to talk about CSS updates and news on container queries, rolling out cascade layers, !important things to remember, custom properties, exit animations, CSS functions, state queries, and more.

Jen Simmons, Apple Evangelist on the Web Developer Experience team for Safari & Webkit, stops by to talk about what Interop is, and a look ahead at new CSS features in Webkit and Safari such as JPEG XL, masks, a round function, JavaScript improvements, styling form controls, content unblocks, masonry, and more!

Adam Argyle stops by to chat about the conversation that's happening around CSS Grid / Masonry. What do we want? What might Apple's response to Google be? And nitpicking the spec just for fun.

On this epsiode we're talking about the current state of blogging and social media, the polyfill hack, whether in app browsers should be banned, web components and the difficulty of front end web dev, and how we would go about teaching CSS from scratch in 2024.

With the growing eco-system of CSS, designers, and developers are continually seeking ways to leverage its power for interactive UI elements. One such element is the toggle button, an essential interactive component. While more complex features might require JavaScript or …

In recent years, ghost buttons have solidified their position as a trendy and elegant element. Characterized by their transparent nature and minimalist outline, ghost buttons, also known as “empty” or “naked” buttons, offers a sleek, clean aesthetic that can improve …

Imagine you’re on a website, eagerly waiting for content to load, but all you see is a blank screen. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? The spinning loader, or spinner, is a UI element designed to combat this exact problem. It informs …

Embossing is a graphical effect used to give the impression that the surface of an image has been raised or pressed in. In web design, an embossed text effect can give your typography a three-dimensional look and feel, often lending …

Web designers often seek tools that can bring static elements to life, and CSS keyframes are a great ally for this task. Keyframes enable us to animate elements over a certain duration, providing our designs with a dynamic feel. Below, …

CSS truly is a remarkable tool in a web designer’s toolkit, capable of bringing even the most vibrant creative visions to life. Today, we’re immersing ourselves in the radiant world of neon style buttons, showcasing the impressive spectrum of CSS …

Web design takes a captivating turn when CSS comes into play. It enables a world of transformations, such as taking static text elements and infusing them with life. Our focus today is one such engaging transformation – animate gradient text …

Google’s Material Design guidelines introduced the ripple effect, a subtle animation that indicates user action. The ripple effect rapidly gained popularity in web design as a sophisticated visual feedback form that refines user interaction, particularly on buttons. Today, we’ll show …

Web design can serve as a playful exploration ground for learning new techniques. In today’s guide, we’ll dive into the creation of an underwater CSS text effect, not just for the visual outcome, but to deepen our understanding of how …

CSS offers an array of tools that, when used correctly, can improve the visual experience on your website. In this tutorial, we’ll explore a straightforward way to design a retro text effect with pure CSS. The approach, while not overly …

Rachel Andrew guides us through a tour of the last fifteen years in CSS layout, as manifested in articles here on 24 ways. From the days when Internet Explorer 6 was de rigueur, right up to the modern age of evergreen browsers, the only thing you can be sure of is that the web never stands still for long.

I’ve written nine articles in the 15 years of 24 ways, and all but one of those articles had something to do with CSS. In this last year of the project, I thought I would take a look back at those CSS articles. It’s been an interesting journey, and by reading through my words from the last 15 years I discovered not only how much the web platform has evolved - but how my own thinking has shifted with it.

2005: CSS layout starting points

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 6 (at this point 4 years old), IE5.1 Mac, Netscape 8, Firefox 1.5, Safari 2

Fifteen years ago, my contributions to 24 ways started with a piece about CSS layout. That article explored something I had been using in my own work. In 2005, most of the work I was doing was building websites from Photoshop files delivered to me by my design agency clients. I’d built up a set of robust, tried-and-tested CSS layouts to use to implement these. My starting point when approaching any project was to take a look at the static comps and figure out which layout I would use:

• Liquid, multiple column with no footer
• Liquid, multiple column with footer
• Fixed width, centred

At that point, there were still many sites being shipped with table-based layouts. We had learned how to use floats to create columns some four years earlier, however layout was still a difficult and often fragile thing. By developing patterns that I knew worked, where I had figured out any strange bugs, I saved myself a lot of time.

Of course, I wasn’t the only person thinking in this way. The two sites from which the early CSS for layout enthusiasts took most of their inspiration, had a library of patterns for CSS layout. The Noodle Incident little boxes is still online, glish.com/css is sadly only available at the Internet Archive.

This thinking was taken to a much greater extreme in 2011, when Twitter Bootstrap launched and starting with an entire framework for layout and much more became commonplace across the industry. While I understand the concern many folk have about every website ending up looking the same, back in 2005 I was a pragmatist. That has not changed. I’ve always built websites and run businesses alongside evangelizing web standards and contributing to the platform. I’m all about getting the job done, paying the bills, balancing that with trying to make things better so we don’t need to make as many compromises in the future. If that means picking from one of a number of patterns, that is often a very reasonable approach. Not everything needs to be a creative outpouring.

Today however, CSS Grid Layout and Flexbox mean that we can take a much more fluid approach to developing layouts. This enables the practical and the creative alike. The need for layout starting points - whether simple like mine, or a full framework like Bootstrap - seems to be decreasing, however in their place comes an interest in component libraries. This approach to development partly enabled by the fact that new layout makes it possible to drop a component into the middle of a layout without blowing the whole thing up.

2006: Faster Development with CSS Constants

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 7, Netscape 8.1, Firefox 2, Safari 2

My article in 2006 was once again taken from the work I was doing as a developer. I’ve always been as much, if not more of a backend developer than a frontend one. In 2006, I was working in PHP on custom CMS implementations. These would also usually include the front-end work. Along with several other people in the industry I’d been experimenting with ways to use CSS “constants” as we all seemed to call them, by processing the CSS with our server-side language of choice.

The use case was mostly for development, although as a CMS developer, I could see the potential of allowing these values to be updated via the CMS. Perhaps to allow a content editor to change a color scheme.

Also in 2006, the first version of Sass was released, created by Hampton Catlin and Natalie Weizenbaum. Sass, LESS and other pre-processors began to give us a more streamlined and elegant way to achieve variables in CSS.

In 2009, the need for pre-processors purely for variables is disappearing. CSS now has Custom Properties - something I did not foresee in 2006. These “CSS Variables” are far more powerful than swapping out a value in a build process. They can be changed dynamically, based on something changing in the environment, rather than being statically set at build time.

2009: Cleaner Code with CSS3 Selectors

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 3

After a break from writing for 24 ways, in 2009 I wrote this piece about CSS3 Selectors, complete with jQuery fallbacks due to the fact that some of these selectors were not usable in Internet Explorer 8.

Today these useful selectors have wide browser support, we also have a large number of new selectors which are part of the Level 4 specification. The changes section of the Level 4 spec gives an excellent rundown of what has been added over the years. Browser support for these newer selectors is more inconsistent, MDN has an excellent list with the page for each selector detailing current browser support and usage examples.

2012: Giving Content Priority with CSS3 Grid Layout

Latest web browser versions: Internet Explorer 10, Firefox 17, Safari 6, Chrome 23

My 2012 piece was at the beginning of my interest in the CSS Grid Layout specification. Earlier in 2012 I had attended a workshop given by Bert Bos, in which he demonstrated some early stage CSS modules, including the CSS Grid Layout specification. I soon discovered that there would be an implementation of Grid in IE10, the new browser shipped in September of 2012 and I set about learning how to use Grid Layout. This article was based on what I had learned.

The problem of source versus visual order

As a CMS developer I immediately linked the ability to lay out items and prioritize content, to the CMS and content editors. I was keen to find ways to allow content editors to prioritize content across breakpoints, and I felt that Grid Layout might allow us to do that. As it turned out, we are still some way away from that goal. While Grid does allow us to separate visual display from source order, it can come at a cost. Non-visual browsers, and the tab order of the document follow the source and not the visual display. This makes it easy to create a disconnected and difficult to use experience if we essentially jumble up the display of elements, moving them away from how they appear in the document. I still think that an issue we need to solve is how to allow developers to indicate that the visual display should be considered the correct order rather than the document order.

The Grid Specification moved on

Some of the issues in this early version of the grid spec were apparent in my article. I needed to use a pre-processor, to calculate the columns an element would span. This was partly due to the fact that the early grid specifications did not have a concept of the gap property. In addition the initial spec did not include auto-placement and therefore each item had to be explicitly placed onto the grid. The basics of the final specification were there, however over the years that followed the specification was refined and developed. We got gaps, and auto-placement, and the grid-template-areas property was introduced. By the time Grid shipped in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari many of the sticky things I had encountered when writing this article were resolved.

2015: Grid, Flexbox, Box Alignment: Our New System for Layout

Latest web browser versions: Edge 13, Firefox 43, Safari 9, Chrome 47

Grid still hadn’t shipped in more browsers but the specification had moved on. We had support for gaps, with the grid-row-gap, grid-column-gap and grid-gap properties. My own thinking about the specification, and the related specifications had developed. I had started teaching grid not as a standalone module, but alongside Flexbox and Box Alignment. I was trying to demonstrate how these modules worked together to create a layout system for modern web development.

Another place my thinking had moved on since my initial Grid article in 2012, was in terms of content reordering and accessibility. In July of 2015 I wrote an article entitled, Modern CSS Layout, Power and Responsibility in which I outlined these concerns.

Some things change, and some stay the same. The grid- prefixed gap properties were ultimately moved into the Box Alignment specification in order that they could be defined for Flex layout and any other layout method which in future required gaps. What I did not expect, was that four years on I would still be being asked about Grid versus Flexbox:

“A question I keep being asked is whether CSS grid layout and flexbox are competing layout systems, as though it might be possible to back the loser in a CSS layout competition. The reality, however, is that these two methods will sit together as one system for doing layout on the web, each method playing to certain strengths and serving particular layout tasks.”

2016: What next for CSS Grid Layout?

Latest web browser versions: Edge 15, Firefox 50, Safari 10, Chrome 55

In 2016, we still didn’t have Grid in browsers, and I was increasingly looking like I was selling CSS vaporware. However, with the spec at Candidate Recommendation, and it looking likely that we would have grid in at least two browsers in the spring, I wrote an article about what might come next for grid.

The main subject was the subgrid feature, which had by that point been removed from the Level 1 specification. The CSS Working Group were still trying to decide whether a version of subgrid locked to both dimensions would be acceptable. In this version we would have declared display: subgrid on the grid item, after which its rows and columns would be locked to the tracks of the parent. I am very glad that it was ultimately decided to allow for one-dimensional subgrids. This means that you can use the column tracks of the parent, yet have an implicit grid for the rows. This enables patterns such as the one I described in A design pattern solved by subgrid. At the end of 2019, we don’t yet have wide browser support for subgrid, however Firefox has already shipped the value in Firefox 71. Hopefully other browsers will follow suit.

Level 2 of the grid specification ultimately became all about adding support for subgrid, and so we don’t yet have any of the other features I mentioned in that piece. All of those features are detailed in issues in the CSS Working Group Github repo, and aren’t forgotten about. As we come to decide features for Level 3, perhaps some of them will make the cut.

It was worth waiting for subgrid, as the one-dimensional version gives us so much more power, and as I take a look back over these 24 ways articles it really underlines how much of a long game contributing to the platform is. I mentioned in the closing paragraph of my 2016 article that you should not feel ignored if your idea or use case is not immediately discussed and added to a spec, and that is still the case. Those of us involved in specifying CSS, and in implementing CSS in browsers care very much about your feedback. We have to balance that with the need for this stuff to be right.

2017: Christmas Gifts for Your Future Self: Testing the Web Platform

Latest web browser versions: Edge 16, Firefox 57, Safari 11, Chrome 63

In 2017 I stepped away from directly talking about layout, and instead published an article about testing. Not about testing your own code, but about the Web Platform Tests project, and how contributing to the tests which help to ensure interoperability between browsers could benefit the platform - and you.

This article is still relevant today as it was two years ago. I’m often asked by people how they can get involved with CSS, and testing is a great place to start. Specifications need tests in order to progress to become Recommendations, therefore contributing tests can materially help the progress of a spec. You can also help to free up the time of spec editors, to make edits to their specs, by contributing tests they might otherwise need to work on.

The Web Platform Tests project has recently got new and improved documentation. If you have some time to spare and would like to help, take a look and see if you can identify some places that are in need of tests. You will learn a lot about the CSS specs you are testing while doing so, and you can feel that you are making a useful and much-needed contribution to the development of the web platform.

2018: Researching a Property in the CSS Specifications

Latest web browser versions: Edge 17, Firefox 64, Safari 12, Chrome 71

I almost stayed away from layout in my 2018 piece, however I did feature the Grid Layout property grid-auto-rows in this article. If you want to understand how to dig up all the details of a CSS property, then this article is still useful.

One thing that has changed since I began writing for 24 ways, is the amount of great information available to help you learn CSS. Whether you are someone who prefers to read like me, or a person who learns best from video, or by following along with a tutorial, it’s all out there for you. You don’t have to rely on understanding the specifications, though I would encourage everyone to become familiar with doing so, if just to be able to fact check a tutorial which seems to be doing something other than the resulting code.

2019: And that’s a wrap

Latest web browser versions: Edge 18, Firefox 71, Safari 12, Chrome 79

This year is the final countdown for 24 ways. With so many other publications creating great content, perhaps there is less of a need for an avalanche of writing in the closing days of each year. The archive will stay as a history of what was important, what we were thinking, and the problems of the day - many of which we have now solved in ways that the authors could never have imagined at the time. I can see through my articles how my thinking evolved over the years, and I’m as excited about what comes next as I was back in 2005, wondering how to make CSS layout easier.

About the author

Rachel Andrew is a Director of edgeofmyseat.com, a UK web development consultancy and creators of the small content management system, Perch; a W3C Invited Expert to the CSS Working Group; and Editor in Chief of Smashing Magazine. She is the author of a number of books including The New CSS Layout for A Book Apart and a Google Developer Expert for Web Technologies.

She curates a popular email newsletter on CSS Layout, and is passing on her layout knowledge over at her CSS Layout Workshop.

When not writing about business and technology on her blog at rachelandrew.co.uk or speaking at conferences, you will usually find Rachel running up and down one of the giant hills in Bristol, or attempting to land a small aeroplane while training for her Pilot’s license.

More articles by Rachel

The results from this year's survey are fairly fresh off the presses. We took a little time to sit with them and jot down some things we noticed and found interesting.

State of CSS 2024 Results originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.