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Articles Original Tutorials

Dark mode in 5 minutes, with inverted lightness variables

By now, you probably know that you can use custom properties for individual color components, to avoid repeating the same color coordinates multiple times throughout your theme. You may even know that you can use the same variable for multiple components, e.g. HSL hue and lightness:

:root {
	--primary-hs: 250 30%;
}

h1 {
	color: hsl(var(--primary-hs) 30%);
}

article {
	background: hsl(var(--primary-hs) 90%);
}

article h2 {
	background: hsl(var(--primary-hs) 40%);
	color: white;
}

Here is a very simple page designed with this technque:

Unlike preprocessor variables, you could even locally override the variable, to have blocks with a different accent color:

:root {
	--primary-hs: 250 30%;
	--secondary-hs: 190 40%;
}

article {
	background: hsl(var(--primary-hs) 90%);
}

article.alt {
	--primary-hs: var(--secondary-hs);
}

This is all fine and dandy, until dark mode comes into play. The idea of using custom properties to make it easier to adapt a theme to dark mode is not new. However, in every article I have seen, the strategy suggested is to create a bunch of custom properties, one for each color, and override them in a media query.

This is a fine approach, and you’ll likely want to do that for at least part of your colors eventually. However, even in the most disciplined of designs, not every color is a CSS variable. You often have colors declared inline, especially grays (e.g. the footer color in our example). This means that adding a dark mode is taxing enough that you may put it off for later, especially on side projects.

The trick I’m going to show you will make anyone who knows enough about color cringe (sorry Chris!) but it does help you create a dark mode that works in minutes. It won’t be great, and you should eventually tweak it to create a proper dark mode (also dark mode is not just about swapping colors) but it’s better than nothing and can serve as a base.

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Articles

Mass function overloading: why and how?

One of the things I’ve been doing for the past few months (on and off—more off than on TBH) is rewriting Bliss to use ESM 1. Since Bliss v1 was not using a modular architecture at all, this introduced some interesting challenges.

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Tutorials

Writable getters

Setters removing themselves are reminiscent of Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, an ancient symbol. Media credit

A pattern that has come up a few times in my code is the following: an object has a property which defaults to an expression based on its other properties unless it’s explicitly set, in which case it functions like a normal property. Essentially, the expression functions as a default value.

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Personal

Position Statement for the 2020 W3C TAG Election

Update: I got elected!! Thank you so much to every W3C member organization who voted for me. 🙏🏼 Now on to making the Web better, alongside fellow TAG members!

Context: I’m running for one of the four open seats in this year’s W3C TAG election. The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is the Working Group that ensures that Web Platform technologies are usable and follow consistent design principles, whether they are created inside or outside W3C. It advocates for the needs of everyone who uses the Web and everyone who works on the Web. If you work for a company that is a W3C Member, please consider encouraging your AC rep to vote for me! My candidate statement follows.

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Articles

The case for Weak Dependencies in JS

Earlier today, I was briefly entertaining the idea of writing a library to wrap and enhance querySelectorAll in certain ways. I thought I’d rather not introduce a Parsel dependency out of the box, but only use it to parse selectors properly when it’s available, and use more crude regex when it’s not (which would cover most use cases for what I wanted to do).

In the olden days, where every library introduced a global, I could just do:

if (window.Parsel) {
	let ast = Parsel.parse();
	// rewrite selector properly, with AST
}
else {
	// crude regex replace
}

However, with ESM, there doesn’t seem to be a way to detect whether a module is imported, without actually importing it yourself.

I tweeted about this…

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Tips

Simple pie charts with fallback, today

Five years ago, I had written this extensive Smashing Magazine article detailing multiple different methods for creating simple pie charts, either with clever use of transforms and pseudo-elements, or with SVG stroke-dasharray. In the end, I mentioned creating pie charts with conic gradients, as a future technique. It was actually a writeup of my “The Missing Slice” talk, and an excerpt of my CSS Secrets book, which had just been published.

I was reminded of this article today by someone on Twitter:

I suggested conic gradients, since they are now supported in >87% of users’ browsers, but he needed to support IE11. He suggested using my polyfill from back then, but this is not a very good idea today.

Indeed, unless you really need to display conic gradients, even I would not recommend using the polyfill on a production facing site. It requires -prefix-free, which re-fetches (albeit from cache) your entire CSS and sticks it in a <style> element, with no sourcemaps since those were not a thing back when -prefix-free was written. If you’re already using -prefix-free, the polyfill is great, but if not, it’s way too heavy a dependency.

Pie charts with fallback (modern browsers)

Instead, what I would recommend is graceful degradation, i.e. to use the same color stops, but in a linear gradient.

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Original Tips

The -​-var: ; hack to toggle multiple values with one custom property

What if I told you you could use a single property value to turn multiple different values on and off across multiple different properties and even across multiple CSS rules?

What if I told you you could turn this flat button into a glossy skeuomorphic button by just tweaking one custom property --is-raised, and that would set its border, background image, box and text shadows in one fell swoop?

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Rants Thoughts

The failed promise of Web Components

Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers. Remember how exciting it was every time we got new shiny HTML elements that actually do stuff? Remember how exciting it was to be able to do sliders, color pickers, dialogs, disclosure widgets straight in the HTML, without having to include any widget libraries?

The promise of Web Components was that we’d get this convenience, but for a much wider range of HTML elements, developed much faster, as nobody needs to wait for the full spec + implementation process. We’d just include a script, and boom, we have more elements at our disposal!

Or, that was the idea. Somewhere along the way, the space got flooded by JS frameworks aficionados, who revel in complex APIs, overengineered build processes and dependency graphs that look like the roots of a banyan tree.

This is what the roots of a Banyan tree look like. Photo by David Stanley on Flickr (CC-BY).
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Articles

Developer priorities throughout their career

I made this chart in the amazing Excalidraw about two weeks ago:

It only took me 10 minutes! Shortly after, my laptop broke down into repeated kernel panics, and it spent about 10 days in service (I was in a remote place when it broke, so it took some time to get it to service). Yesterday, I was finally reunited with it, turned it on, launched Chrome, and saw it again. It gave me a smile, and I realized I never got to post it, so I tweeted this:

The tweet kinda blew up! It seems many, many developers identify with it. A few also disagreed with it, especially with the “Does it actually work?” line. So I figured I should write a bit about the rationale behind it. I originally wrote it in a tweet, but then I realized I should probably post it in a less transient medium, that is more well suited to longer text.

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Apps & scripts Original

Parsel: A tiny, permissive CSS selector parser

I’ve posted before about my work for the Web Almanac this year. To make it easier to calculate the stats about CSS selectors, we looked to use an existing selector parser, but most were too big and/or had dependencies or didn’t account for all selectors we wanted to parse, and we’d need to write our own walk and specificity methods anyway. So I did what I usually do in these cases: I wrote my own!

You can find it here: https://projects.verou.me/parsel/

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