Snippets

When I tell coworkers of my unabated love for CSS they look at me like I’ve made an unfortunate life decision.

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Sometimes I feel that developers, some of the most opinionated human beings on the planet, can only agree on one thing: that CSS is totally the worst.

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But today I’m going to blow your mind. Today I’m going to try to convince you that not only is CSS one of the best technologies you use on a day-to-day basis, not only is CSS incredibly well designed, but that you should be thankful—thankful!—each and every time you open a .css file.

My argument is relatively simple: creating a comprehensive styling mechanism for building complex user interfaces is startlingly hard, and every alternative to CSS is much worse. Like, it’s not even close.

WebKit now supports the prefers-reduced-motion media feature, part of CSS Media Queries Level 5, User Preferences. The feature can be used in a CSS @media block or through the window.matchMedia() interface in JavaScript. Web designers and developers can use this feature to serve alternate animations that avoid motion sickness triggers experienced by some site visitors.

To explain who this media feature is for, and how it’s intended to work, we’ll cover some background. Skip directly to the code samples or prefers-reduced-motion demo if you wish.

How you design and implement your toggle buttons is quite up to you, but I hope you’ll remember this post when it comes to adding this particular component to your pattern library. There’s no reason why toggle buttons — or any interface component for that matter — should marginalize the number of people they often do.

You can take the basics explored here and add all sorts of design nuances, including animation. It’s just important to lay a solid foundation first.

Checklist

• Use form elements such as checkboxes for on/off toggles if you are certain the user won’t believe they are for submitting data.
• Use <button> elements, not links, with aria-pressed or role="switch" plus aria-checked.
• Don’t change label and state together.
• When using visual “on” and “off” text labels (or similar) you can override these with a unique label via aria-labelledby.
• Be careful to make sure the contrast level between the button’s text and background color meets WCAG 2.0 requirements.

See the source link for very detailed descriptions of all of these points.

Linear gradients are easy to create in CSS and are extremely useful. As we’ll go through in this article, we can make them visually much smoother by creating them with non-linear gradients. Well, non-linear in the easing sense, anyway!

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In Material Design style guidelines for images, the designers at Google talk about text protection gradients. They call them a scrim. They recommend:

[the] gradient should be long… with the center point about 3/10 towards the darker side of the gradient. This gives the gradient a natural falloff and avoids a sharp edge.

We can’t create exactly that with linear gradients, but we can (and will) create a “low poly” approximation with more color stops.

Using only 5 color stops (like in the illustration above) would create some serious banding. Adding more stops makes the gradient a lot smoother. This is exactly what I’ve done in the demo you saw in the first image in this article. Il buono has a 13 color-stop gradient, which makes it blend nicer into the image.

(See the comments in the source link for Sass mixins.)

See also the gradient easing generator by the same author.

The :focus-within pseudo class becomes active when an element itself has focus or if any of its descendants does.

Take for example the following HTML code:

and the following CSS:

If the div with the class .container receives focus (it can in this case as it has a tabindex of 0, this is purely for example purposes), it will have a background colour of #aaa.

But it will also have a background colour of #aaa if any of its descendants have the focus. So if the <input> receives focus, then the div’s background will also be #aaa.

This will remove the need for JavaScript that is often used to achieve this effect.

Well, this settles that.

When you think about how much of your life (personally and professionally) is wrapped up in your business, it seems to make sense to think that by consolidating tasks, cutting corners, or just taking it all on yourself, you’ll save money and time.

Here’s the problem with that sort of thinking: it’s a dangerous and highly inefficient way to conduct business when you work in web design. No matter the size of our business, we rely on proven processes and techniques to ensure that what we create is always of the highest quality. Let’s face it, we are specialists, and diluting our offering by trying to do everything isn’t fair to our clients or ourselves.

My suggestion? Let more qualified people or tools tackle the “stuff” that forces you to slow down, lose productivity, and create something less than what your clients deserve. Sure, it’s scary to think about how much it will cost to outsource your accounting, your SEO, or anything else that isn’t in your wheelhouse. But think about how much momentum and overall quality of work you lose whenever you let that fear take over. I say: focus on what you do best, outsource the rest, and be happily surprised when you see how much your business soars as a result.

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