Snippets

These snippets are my attempt to save and organize various bits of code, best practices, and resources relating to web development and design. They also function as a to do list of sorts, for things I want to implement in my own code, but haven't yet. The concept is inspired by Jeremy Keith's links and CSS-Tricks, among other things. Enjoy.

BEM class selectors and the Sass ampersand

The Sass ampersand is incredibly useful in building selectors based on the parent selector, but it has a limitation. Take the following nested BEM-style selectors:

Sass

.component {
  // A BEM modifier.
  &--reversed {
    background: white;
    border-color: lightgray;
 
    // Target a descendent only when the parent has the modifier? Not exactly...
    &__child-element {
      background: rebeccapurple;
    }
  }
}

The linked post explains the problem:

Wait, why is this not working? The problem is that the & has a scope of .component--reversed, so &__child-element compiles to .component--reversed__child-element, which doesn’t [exist] in the markup.

The fix is to save the & to a variable in the parent and use that in the child selector:

Sass

.component {
  // Save the current value of & as $self.
  $self: &;
 
  &--reversed {
    background: white;
    border-color: lightgray;
 
    // Print $self in place of & to get the correct scope of the parent above.
    #{$self}__child-element {
      background: rebeccapurple;
    }
  }
}

The compiled CSS for that element is now .component--reversed .component__child-element[.]

Source link
Using Sass to Control Scope With BEM Naming | CSS-Tricks
Tags
Sass
CSS - BEM

Allow Ctrl- and Shift-clicking links in event handlers

I just recently updated a bunch of my click handlers to not act when the Ctrl or Shift keys are pressed during the click, so that links can be opened in new tabs or windows by the user if so wanted:

JavaScript

// Don't do anything and defer to the default action if a modifier key
// was pressed during the click (to open the link in a new tab, window,
// etc.) - note that this is a truthy check rather than a strict check
// for the existence of and boolean true value of the various event
// properties:
// * https://ambientimpact.com/web/snippets/conditional-statements-and-truthy-values-robust-client-side-javascript
// * https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MouseEvent/ctrlKey
// * https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MouseEvent/shiftKey
if (event.ctrlKey || event.shiftKey) {
  return;
}
Tags
JavaScript
JavaScript - Events
Accessibility
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