Tags: styling

Blinded By the Light DOM – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

You just take some normal HTML markup, wrap it with a custom element, and then write some JS to add capabilities which you can then style with regular CSS! Everything’s of the Light Side of the Web. No need to pierce the Vale of Shadows or whatever.

I think Eric’s approach here should be the default for most web components: you probably don’t need to mess around with the shadow DOM, and you should definitely be wrapping your web component around existing HTML instead of witing opening and closing tags with nothing in between.

As Chris puts it:

Augment, don’t replace.

Progressively Enhanced Form Validation, Part 1: HTML and CSS – Cloud Four

A great reminder of just how much you can do with modern markup and styles when it comes to form validation. The :user-invalid and :user-valid pseudo-classes are particularly handy!

While I’m talking about the SVGs on The Session, I thought I’d share something else related to the rendering of the sheet music.

Like I said, I use the brilliant abcjs JavaScript library. It converts ABC notation into sheet music on the fly, which still blows my mind.

If you view source on the rendered SVG, you’ll see that the path and rect elements have been hard-coded with a colour value of #000000. That makes sense. You’d want to display sheet music on a light background, probably white. So it seems like a safe assumption.

Ah, but when it comes to front-end development, assumptions are like little hidden bombs just waiting to go off!

I got an email the other day:

Hi Jeremy,

I have vision problems, so I need to use high-contrast mode (using Windows 11). In high-contrast mode, the sheet-music view is just black!

Doh! All my CSS adapts just fine to high-contrast mode, but those hardcoded hex values in the SVG aren’t going to be affected by high-contrtast mode.

Stepping back, the underlying problem was that I didn’t have a full separation of concerns. Most of my styling information was in my CSS, but not all. Those hex values in the SVG should really be encoded in my style sheet.

I couldn’t remove the hardcoded hex values—not without messing around with JavaScript beyond my comprehension—so I made the fix in CSS:

[fill="#000000"] {
  fill: currentColor;
}
[stroke="#000000"] {
  stroke: currentColor;
}

That seemed to do the trick. I wrote back to the person who had emailed me, and they were pleased as punch:

Well done, Thanks!  The staff, dots, etc. all appear as white on a black background.  When I click “Print”, it looks like it still comes out black on a white background, as expected.

I’m very grateful that they brought the issue to my attention. If they hadn’t, that assumption would still be lying in wait, preparing to ambush someone else.

CSS Text balancing with text-wrap:balance - Ahmad Shadeed

Ahmad runs through some of the scenarios where text-wrap: balance could be handy.

Even though it’s not well-supported yet in browsers, there’s no reason not to start adding it to sites now; it’s classic progressive enhancement.

When is :focus-visible visible? | bitsofcode

1. Has the user expressed a preference for always visible focus?
2. Does the focused element support keyboard input?
3. Is the user interacting with the focused element with a non-pointing device?
4. Did a script cause focus to move from a previously visibly-focused element?

The perfect link - The A11Y Collective

How do we write, design, and code a link that works for everyone on every device? Let’s dive into the world of creating the perfect link, without making a pig’s breakfast of it.

Preventing too-short final lines of blocks | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.

Some simple ways to make content look good - Set Studio

This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.

An end to typographic widows on the web | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Rich explains what text-wrap:balance does …and what it doesn’t.

The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden

I agree with the reasoning here—a new display value would be ideal.

Ever get the urge to style a good document?

No? Just me, then.

Well, the urge came over me recently so I started styling this single-page site:

A Few Notes On The Culture by Iain M Banks

I’ve followed this document across multiple locations over the years. It started life as a newsgroup post on rec.arts.sf.written in 1994. Ken McLeod published it there on Iain M Banks’s behalf.

The post complements the epic series of space opera books that Iain M Banks set in the anarcho-utopian society of The Culture. It’s a fascinating piece of world building, as well as an insight into the author’s mind.

I first became aware of it many few years later, after a copy had been posted to the web. That URL died, but Adrian Hon kept a copy on his site. Lots of copies keep stuff safe, so after contemplating linkrot, I made a copy on this site too.

But I recently thought that maybe it deserved a bit of art direction, so I rolled up my sleeves and started messing around, designing in the browser and following happy little accidents.

The finished result is still fairly sparse. It’s still entirely text, except for a background image that shows up if your screen is wide enough. That image of a planet originally started as an infra-red snapshot of Jupiter by the James Webb Space Telescope that I worked over until it was unrecognisable.

The text itself is the main focus of the design though. I knew I wanted to play around with a variable font. Mona Sans from Github was one of the first ones I tried and I found it instantly suitable. I had a lot of fun playing with different weights and widths.

After a bit of messing around, I realised that the heading styles were reminding me of some later reissues of The Culture novels, so I leant into that, deliberately styling the byline to resemble the treatment of the author’s name on those book covers.

There isn’t all that much CSS. I’ve embedded it in the head of the HTML rather than linking to a separate style sheet, so feel free to view source and poke around in there. You’ll see that I’m making liberal use of custom properties, the clamp function, and logical properties.

Originally I had a light mode and dark mode but I found that the dark mode was much more effective so I ditched the lighter option.

I did make sure to include some judicious styles for print, so if you fancy reading on paper, it should print out nicely.

Oh, and of course it’s a progressive web app that works offline.

I didn’t want to mess with the original document other than making some typographic tweaks to punctuation, but I wanted to break up the single wall of text. I wasn’t about to start using pull quotes on the web so in the end I decided to introduce some headings that weren’t in the original document:

1. Government
2. Economics
3. Technology
4. Philosophy
5. Lifestyle
6. Travel
7. Habitat
8. Legal System
9. Politics
10. Identity
11. Nomenclature
12. Cosmology

If your browser viewport is tall enough, the heading for the current section you’re reading will remain sticky as you scroll. No JavaScript required.

I’m pretty pleased with how this little project turned out. It was certainly fun to experiment with fluid type and a nice variable font.

I can add this to my little collection of single-page websites I’ve whittled over the years:

• A Few Notes On The Culture
• The Gęsiówka Story
• Design Principles
• Brighton SF

Line heights in CSS work better with ratios | Andy Bell

There’s a broader point here about declarative design:

Setting very specific values may feel like you’re in more control, but you’re actually rescinding control by introducing fragility in the form of overly-specific CSS.

Conditional CSS - Ahmad Shadeed

I like to think of CSS as a conditional design language.

Yes! This is exactly what I’m talking about with declarative design!

Read on for some fantastic examples. And also, Ahmad makes a comparison between CSS and Figma, pointing out that the conditional, declarative possibilities currently aren’t available in graphic design tools.

A CSS challenge: skewed highlight — Vadim Makeev

I did not know about box-decoration-break—sounds like a game-changer for text effects that wrap onto multiple lines.

Tree views in CSS

Styling a list of nested details elements to create a beautiful lokking tree view, all in CSS, all nicely accessible.

User Stylesheets Are Still Pretty Great and Should Be More Widely Supported — Pixel Envy

Hear, hear!

If you have even a passing knowledge of CSS, I encourage you to experiment with its possibilities.

12 Days of Web

All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.

dbohdan/classless-css: A list of classless CSS themes/frameworks with screenshots

A collection of stylesheets that don’t use class selectors. Think of them as alternatives to default user-agent stylesheets.

An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS

This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!

CSS Timeline

Here’s a remarkably in-depth timeline of the web’s finest programming language, from before it existed to today’s thriving ecosystem. And the timeline is repsonsive too—lovely!