currentColor is a fantastic CSS value and one that not nearly enough people know about.
currentColor is a value that takes on the value of whatever color is currently set to for that selector, whether it's implicitly set or if it's inherited.
This might sound a bit strange, but here is an example where it can be really useful for buttons that have a border that matches the font color
Read moreCustom properties are everywhere now, and for good reason as there are so many useful — and fun! — applications that you can do with them!
A couple of weeks ago, I had an article published on CSS-Tricks where I looked at the benefits of locally scoping custom properties. In that article I quickly mentioned how it could be really useful to create a button scale.
The article ended up being really long, so I cut out the part about creating a button scale with custom properties. I think it’s a really fun application though, as there are two different ways you could approach it.
Read moreposition: fixed has been a staple of CSS for a long time now, and it’s served us well. More recently, we’ve been treated with position: sticky.
Both of them are really similar but there are some important differences. In this post, we’ll be looking at the differences, as well as the use cases for each.
Read moreOne of my favorite classes to teach at my school is the introduction to HTML & CSS. It’s so much fun seeing people who’ve never even seen a line of code be able to make websites on their own after only a bit of time together.
As much fun as it is once they start to get the hang of it, I also see how daunting it is for them the first time I tell them to make a page from scratch without my help. It also lets me see all the mistakes they make when they start trying to make their very first pages all on their own.
Read moreI’ve seen complaints that you can’t append a unit to a custom property.
The complaints seem to come from not being able to do something like this:
.icon {
--scale: 1;
/* this doesn't work */
font-size: var(--scale) + 'px';
}
Granted, that would be awesome if we could do that. But we aren’t writing JavaScript, so we can’t.
Read moreThe + combinator is amazing but I always forget that it exists. I recently used it when making a few updates to this site, and thought it would be fun to explore why I love it so much.
+ combinator worksI feel like the MDN describes it perfectly, saying “The + combinator selects adjacent siblings. This means that the second element directly follows the first, and both share the same parent”.
On my own site, I have the following markup on my articles (such as this one).
<h1>Article title</h1>
<time class="date">March 3 2019</time>
<p>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Accusamus in ullam
voluptatibus consequatur, vel hic?
</p>
<p>
Quia, ipsam! Dolores corporis ullam, ut natus consequatur, quaerat
necessitatibus officiis, incidunt rerum ex ea!
</p>
<p>
Velit amet blanditiis tempora, incidunt, sint dolor architecto at et
similique, ex nulla hic fugiat.
</p>
I don’t have classes on any of my paragraphs because I write everything with markup. I could configure things to add something like a .intro to the first paragraph, but there is no need.
I could use something like p:nth-of-type(1) but that would have a lot of potential to break things throughout the rest of a site. In my case, it would affect all my pages, so I’d have to add another selector to ensure I’m on an article.
A great solution is using the + combinator in my CSS selectors:
I recently came across background-attachment: local because of this super amazing trick over on Smashing Magazine that adds a gradient on the sides of a table… only if the table is overflowing. It’s really neat, but while I knew of the scroll and fixed values for background-attachment, I’d never heard of local before.