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Articles Original Tutorials

Custom properties with defaults: 3+1 strategies

When developing customizable components, one often wants to expose various parameters of the styling as custom properties, and form a sort of CSS API. This is still underutlized, but there are libraries, e.g. Shoelace, that already list custom properties alongside other parts of each component’s API (even CSS parts!).

Note: I’m using “component” here broadly, as any reusable chunk of HTML/CSS/JS, not necessarily a web component or framework component. What we are going to discuss applies to reusable chunks of HTML just as much as it does to “proper” web components.

Let’s suppose we are designing a certain button styling, that looks like this:

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Articles Original Tutorials

Inherit ancestor font-size, for fun and profit

If you’ve been writing CSS for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the em unit, and possibly the other type-relative units. We are going to refer to em for the rest of this post, but anything described works for all type-relative units.

As you well know, em resolves to the current font size on all properties except font-size, where it resolves to the parent font size. It can be quite useful for making scalable components that adapt to their context size.

However, I have often come across cases where you actually need to “circumvent” one level of this. Either you need to set font-size to the grandparent font size instead of the parent one, or you need to set other properties to the parent font size, not the current one.

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Rants

Is the current tab active?

Today I ran into an interesting problem. Interesting because it’s one of those very straightforward, deceptively simple questions, that after a fair amount of digging, does not appear to have a definite answer (though I would love to be wrong!).

The problem was to determine if the current tab is active. Yes, as simple as that.

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Uncategorized

82% of developers get this 3 line CSS quiz wrong

(I always wanted to do a clickbait title like this and when this chance came along I could not pass it up. 😅 Sorry!)

While putting my ideas into slides for my Dynamic CSS workshop for next week, I was working on a slide explaining how the CSS wide keywords work with custom properties. inherit, initial, unset I had used numerous times and knew well. But what about revert? How did that work? I had an idea, but quickly coded up a demo to try it out.

The code was:

:root {
    --accent-color: skyblue;
}

div {
    --accent-color: revert; 
    background: var(--accent-color, orange);
}

Phew, I was correct, but the amount of uncertainty I had before seeing the result tipped me that I might be on to something.

Before you read on, take a moment to think about what you would vote. Warning: Spoilers ahead!

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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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