An experiment that uses pseudo-elements to create 84 simple GUI icons using CSS and semantic HTML. Shared as an exercise in creative problem solving and working within constraints. This is not a “production ready” CSS icon set.

Demo: Pure CSS GUI icons

Known support: Firefox 3.5+, Safari 5+, Chrome 5+, Opera 10.6+.

An exercise in constraint

Several months ago I was experimenting with the creation of common GUI icons with CSS. The HTML is very simple and it relies on CSS pseudo-elements rather than extraneous HTML elements. The technical aspects of this exercise might be of interest to others, so I’ve decided to share it.

Pseudo-elements provide many possibilities to developers interested in enhancing existing semantic HTML.

Example code

The technique behind this experiment is an expansion of the basic shape-creation that was used to make Pure CSS speech bubbles. Some of these GUI icons can only be created in browsers that support CSS3 transforms.

The HTML is a basic unordered list of links.

<ul>
  <li class="power"><a href="#non">Power</a></li>
  <li class="play"><a href="#non">Play</a></li>
  <li class="stop"><a href="#non">Stop</a></li>
  <li class="pause"><a href="#non">Pause</a></li>
</ul>

Each icon uses its own set of styles. For example, the key parts of the CSS responsible for the “expand” icon are as follows:

.expand a:before {
  content: "";
  position: absolute;
  top: 50%;
  left: 1px;
  width: 5px;
  height: 0;
  border-width: 7px 7px 0;
  border-style: solid;
  border-color: transparent #c55500;
  margin-top: -4px;
  /* css3 */
  -webkit-transform: rotate(-45deg);
  -moz-transform: rotate(-45deg);
  -o-transform: rotate(-45deg);
  transform: rotate(-45deg);
}

.expand a:after {
  content: "";
  position: absolute;
  top: 50%;
  left: 5px;
  width: 8px;
  height: 8px;
  border-width: 3px 0 0 3px;
  border-style: solid;
  border-color: #c55500;
  margin-top: -6px;
}

.expand a:hover:before,
.expand a:focus:before,
.expand a:active:before {
  border-color: transparent #730800;
}

.expand a:hover:after,
.expand a:focus:after,
.expand a:active:after {
  border-color: #730800;
}

The demo page contains a full set of user interaction and media player control icons, as well as other common icons. For now, several icons actually require more than one element as CSS 2.1 only specifies 2 pseudo-elements per element that can contain generated content. The CSS3 Generated and Replaced Content Module allows for an unlimited number of pseudo-elements but has yet to be fully implemented in any modern browser.

The git-checkout command can be used to update specific files or directories in your working tree with those from another branch, without merging in the whole branch. This can be useful when working with several feature branches or using GitHub Pages to generate a static project site.

The git-checkout manual page describes how the git checkout command is not just useful for switching between branches.

When <paths> or --patch are given, git checkout does not switch branches. It updates the named paths in the working tree from the index file or from a named <tree-ish> (most often a commit)…The <tree-ish> argument can be used to specify a specific tree-ish (i.e. commit, tag or tree) to update the index for the given paths before updating the working tree.

In git, a tree-ish is a way of referring to a particular commit or tree. This can be a partial sha or the branch, remote, and tag name pointers.

The syntax for using git checkout to update the working tree with files from a tree-ish is as follows:

git checkout [-p|--patch] [<tree-ish>] [--] <pathspec>…

Therefore, to update the working tree with files or directories from another branch, you can use the branch name pointer in the git checkout command.

git checkout <branch_name> -- <paths>

As an example, this is how you could update your gh-pages branch on GitHub (used to generate a static site for your project) to include the latest changes made to a file that is on the master branch.

# On branch master
git checkout gh-pages
git checkout master -- myplugin.js
git commit -m "Update myplugin.js from master"

The need to update my gh-pages branch with specific files from my master branch was how I first found out about the other uses of the checkout command. It’s worth having a read of the rest of the git-checkout manual page and experimenting with the options.

Mellon, Elizabeth

Caudle, Gerrie

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Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, author

Ferguson, Matt

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Bronckart, Véronique, author

Lovelace, Mary

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Wellhoff, Thierry, author

Clark, Robert A., author

Satheesh, Mithun, author

Mains, Norman

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