Articles by CSS Tricks from September 2015

It all started with this question Keith Clark recently asked on twitter.CSS repeating-linear-gradients, do we need these? Can't the same thing be achieved with a linear-gradient and background-size?Th...

The strange thing about using CSS to style SVG elements is that only certain properties can be used, depending on the element. For instance, you can set the fill on a <polygon>, but not the po...

A handy guide to fixing common mistakes with Git from Joshua Wehner:One of the most useful features of any version control system is the ability to "undo" your mistakes. In Git, "undo" can mean many s...

Paul Irish made a comprehensive list of all the JavaScript properties and methods that can cause a reflow. The big idea: do these things as infrequently and intelligently as possible.The CSS equivalen...

It's a 2,000 line behemoth. It's hard to browse or easily find what you are looking in there. What can be done? This article isn't about actually dismantling the file (although that would be a good on...

It's interesting to see how many people over time have come to the conclusion that certain seemingly-harmless words can be problematic while communicating:Four letter words, Jason Fried - May 2007Word...

simurai:I'll try to show a few ways how you can make the cascade be your friend and maybe reduce the need of overriding and thus encounter less fighting with specificity.Direct Link to Article —...

You know how you can extend things in CSS preprocessors? (If not, you can learn about it here.) Sass can do it. LESS can do it. Stylus can do it. While it's a feature you want to be careful with (see ...

The following is a guest post by Faraz Kelhini. Some of this stuff is out of my comfort zone, so I asked Kyle Simpson to tech check it for me. Kyle's answer (which we did during an Office Hours sessio...

Osvaldas Valutis is right, using the <label> to trigger the native browser functionality is the way to go. Then style up the label as needed, enhancing with some JavaScript if you like. Same c...

SVG has a <use> element which essentially means: go find the chunk of SVG that has this #identifier and kinda clone it and put it right here. It's an essential indgredient to an SVG icon syste...

The following is a guest post by Steven Estrella. Steven shared with me a technique for creating customized range inputs by writing a little JavaScript atop some of the techniques explored here by Da...

There are a couple of ways to do knockout text (text that appears cut out, such that you can see a background behind it) on the web. There is one fairly new way that has pretty decent browser support ...

The discussion has heated up with the drop of iOS 9 and its ability to run apps that block ads. That was just the spark for the conversation, as ad blocking isn't a new thing. Desktop browsers have ha...

In the spirit of gathering data on tooling that's been going around, here's Khoi Vinh's data on design tools. No surprises this time: Sketch, HTML/CSS, Slack, Dropbox. Direct Link to Article — P...

Heres a cool PostCSS plugin that lets us write SVG directly in CSS with the rest of our styles:.arrow { @svg { polygon { fill: green; points: 50,100 0,0 0,100; }...

The following is a guest post by Ana Tudor. If you've seen Ana's work, perhaps you know that she uses mathematics and code together to make art. The finished pieces look like they take ages to make. B...

Edd Sowden embarks on an epic accessibility journey where he tries to understand why changing the display property of a table has an impact on its semantic meaning.A couple of notes that I found inter...

Chris Manning takes us through the weird journey that is custom fonts on the web. We started with the "Flash of Unstyled Text", which at first we didn't like because it was abrupt and felt janky and c...

The following is a guest post by David Racodon. David contributes to this open source code quality tool he'll tell you all about. I hadn't heard of it until now, but I know there are lots of folks out...

Dan Wilson has an intro article followed by a 5-part series all about the Web Animations API. If you were unaware, .animate() is a native thing now. I think there is a ton of interesting things about ...

The following is a guest post by Ana Tudor. If you've seen Ana's work, perhaps you know that she uses mathematics and code together to make art. The finished pieces look like they take ages to make. B...

Have you ever had a day at work where you were constantly put towards a new task as you were ramping up on the current one? It feels jarring at best, and completely frustrating and time-wasting at wor...

Set yourself apart. Get better at what you do today and find out how youll be doing your job in a year or two. An Event Apartthree days of design, code, and content for people who make websitesis wher...

Our brand new Office Hours has been going great! We've gotten to meet some of you and help you out of some problems. We've learned, though, that many of you just like to listen, talk shop, and don't n...

Ashley Nolan gathered data on the the tools we're using these days as front end folk. Spoilers: Sass, Gulp, jQuery. But there's a lot of interesting and somewhat surprising data to explore in here. Di...

What's the web performance situation on your main project? For simplicity, but also wide coverage, I broke it down into five choices ranging from a nobody caring to everybody caring. This isn't about ...

In our last poll, we asked "What's your take on managing styles entirely in JavaScript?". This is a concept we wrote about in depth here and recently talked about in a panel on ShopTalk.Over 23,000 pe...

Because sometimes looking at code with arrows that point to each little bit and explain what it does is the best way to understand. If you're new to responsive images, you can poke around here for a b...

Last week we wrote about prefetching and preloading but forgot to mention preconnect. Thankfully however, Ilya Grigorik has written a great post about this elusive resource hint:Preconnect is an impor...

Stephen Hay on the classic designers should learn to code maxim. He sets it up nicely:One thing you notice when hanging hundreds of paintings and drawing by kids, especially the younger ones, is that ...

Fun Friday thing! Natalya on CodePen made a super fun Pen. You know how clicking a <label> with a for attribute that matches a checkbox input, it will toggle the input to checked or unchecked?...

I'd like to specially thank Treehouse today for being such an awesome long-time sponsor of CSS-Tricks. Just imagine how many people they have helped over the years learn web and mobile design and deve...

When we talk about front end performance we think things like concatenation, minification, caching, or gzipping assets on the server so that the page loads faster and users can complete their goals a...

The following is a guest post by Zell Liew. I'm stoked to have Zell dishing out some Gulp 101. Zell has a comprehensive tutorial style (see his post on Susy) that lends itself well to a topic of this ...

We've written a bit about the Priority+ pattern here before. Here's a bunch of real world examples. I needed to use it recently. I found Gijs Rog's priority-navigation. It's pretty nice: no dependenci...