Dave Rupert brainstorms some new CSS organization acronyms.

I’m not anti-BEM nor anti-roboclasses, but as we enter a new era for CSS I think we have an opportunity to rethink best practices around architecting CSS. Before we get lost rethinking the wheel, let’s hold on to some good principles from the past decade or so:

• We want to author in components
• We generally want low-specificity to avoid collisions
• We want a bucket of global utility classes/variables for ad-hoc composition or customizations

With those principles, let’s dive into some CSS architecture alternatives.

He goes on to describe CUBE, HECS, WILS, GPC, and other systems that haven’t even been named yet 😆

This was my favorite moment from our episode with Chris Coyier. I asked him what’s interesting in the frontend world these days and Chris went off for almost five minutes. His enthusiasm is contagious!

This course from the folks at web.dev targets beginners and advanced developers alike.

You’ll learn PWA fundamentals like the Web App Manifest, service workers, how to design with an app in mind, what’s different from a classic web app, how to use other tools to test and debug your PWA. After these fundamentals, you’ll learn about integration with the platform and operating system, how to enhance your PWA’s installation and usage experience, and how to offer an offline experience.

System.css is a CSS library for building interfaces that resemble Apple’s System OS which ran from 1984-1991. Design-wise, not much really changed from System 1 to System 6; however this library is based on System 6 as it was the final monochrome version of MacOS.

Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we’ve officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And…not only has it been a journey for us, but it’s also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.

What’s this? A Frontend Feud! The ShopTalk guys return to defend their championship over Syntax against new contenders: Una and Adam from The CSS Podcast!

Robb Owen:

Why let JS have all the fun? With mix-blend-mode finally gaining wide browser-support, we now have access to many of most common shading techniques in CSS. With some choice images and a bit of careful layering it’s possible to build some surprisingly high-quality effects without the need for introducing any JS dependencies.

If you’ve ever used Photoshop’s Blend Modes… you can basically do that in CSS now. So cool! Check out Robb’s entire article. He includes a lot of great examples.

And if you like Alpine, there’s a companion collection of snippets that you can copy/paste into your project.

Jen Looper from Web Dev for Beginners and Front-end Foxes joins Jerod and Ali to discuss the exciting (but also intimidating) prospect of getting in to web development in 2022! Where should you start? What technologies should you focus on? Is it better to go all-in on a framework or stick with the fundamentals? Stuff like that!

CSS co-designer Steven Pemberton, on Twitter:

!important was added for one reason only: laws in the US that require certain text to be in a given font-size. !important stops the cascade from changing it.

Anything else is probably misuse, and a sign you may not understand the cascade properly.

Chris does a great job answering what will surely be the most common question about this acquisition in his announcement post:

1. What happens to CSS-Tricks?
2. Will you still be running CSS-Tricks?
3. Why now?

The amount of value this team has given to the web world over the years is immeasurable.

I sincerely hope DigitalOcean turns out to be a worthy new steward of this precious resource and the site’s best years are ahead of it. 🤞

Almond.CSS helps in two ways: it normalizes the CSS styles to provide similar experience cross-browser, and it spices things a little by adding custom styles (that can be personalized!)

Use the different HTML5 semantic tags on your website, include the library in your project, and let CSS and the browser work their magic. Just combine your HTML and Almond CSS (no JavaScript needed.)

Demo here. Looks like a great starter for simple side projects and the like.

Jim Nielsen:

It’s easy, in hindsight, to critique things CSS got wrong or should’ve prioritized differently. But I want to take a moment to marvel at the things they got right.

It’s incredibly difficult to build APIs that solve today’s problems while anticipating an unknown future. In some cases, I think the original CSS authors did precisely that.

Anybody who’s had to design/implement HTML emails knows how utterly painful it is. With Mailwind you get to do it the same way you’d build a site with Tailwind and then run:

mailwind --input-html email.html --output-css style.css
# or for inline styles
mailwind --input-html email.html --output-html email-inlined.html

And you’re off to the outbox! 📤

Just wow. This is an impressively hacky hack. You’re probably wondering how? As many such things do, it all starts with a new (Chrome-only) API:

A new set of APIs affectionately known as Houdini give your browser the power to control CSS via its own Object Model in Javascript. In English, this means that you can make custom CSS styles, add custom properties, and so on…

And it ends with something that looks like this:

main {
  // ...
  --sql-query: SELECT name FROM test;
}

Oliver Brotchie developed this CSS fingerprinting technique that requires no Javascript or Cookies to function and avoids anti-tracking methods such as NoScript, VPNs or browser extensions.

CSS Fingerprinting is a technique of tracking and gathering information on site visitors. This method exploits the nature of CSS to track various characteristics about the visitor’s browser and device, which can later be used to either identify or track said visitor.

Right now, at current spec, this method doesn’t scale, but with the next upcoming draft of the CSS specification, CSS Values 4, it will become far more scalable and precise.

Josh Comeau:

Recently, I’ve been using my own custom CSS reset. It includes all of the little tricks I’ve discovered to improve both the user experience and the CSS authoring experience.

Like other CSS resets, it’s unopinionated when it comes to design / cosmetics. You can use this reset for any project, no matter the aesthetic you’re going for.

In this tutorial, we’ll go on a tour of my custom CSS reset. We’ll dig into each rule, and you’ll learn what it does and why you might want to use it!

It has 9 rules and unlike previous resets, the goal is not to create a ‘blank slate’ that is uniform across browsers. Josh walks/talks you through each rule and why they made the cut.

Building a modern front end in Django without reaching for a full-blown JavaScript framework. Choosing the right tools for the job, and bringing them into your project.

This is as close to a tutorial as you’ll see on Changelog News. I’m linking to it not for the step-by-step bits like talking to your “Django backend without a full-page reload”, but for the decision making bits like “when you might choose low-JavaScript.”

Eric Bailey’s take on CSS is certainly counter to the direction most are headed:

Human-friendly CSS is an interface that prioritizes people. It allows someone using your website or web app to easily make modifications to get what they need. This is huge because we can’t know who the person is, or what circumstances they’re experiencing.

Humans reading/modifying your CSS may seem like an edge case, but it’s more common than you think:

Stylus on the Chrome Web Store has more than half a million users. Stylish has over three million. That’s a lot of people modifying the web to get what they want.

He goes on to point out that even if it weren’t that many people, it’s still worth considering for other reasons. Lots to ponder.

JS Party listeners and panelists celebrate our favorite moments from the past 100 episodes! You’ll hear from over 20 of your favorite voices across 14 episodes. We also share some behind-the-scenes and read/hear from listeners! Here’s to the last 200 episodes, and the next 200 as well. 🥂

Your <head> is the single biggest render-blocking part of your page—ensuring it is well-formed is critical. ct.css is a diagnostic CSS snippet that exposes potential performance issues in your page’s <head> tags.

Smashing Mag always delivers on these epic reference-style posts packed with knowledge:

Writing CSS has probably never been more fun and exciting than it is today. In this post we’ll take a look at common problems and use cases we all have to face in our work and how to solve them with modern CSS.

Muffin fairies, thumb wars, and fruit transit can only mean one thing: Explain it Like I’m 5! We’re also covering the news, discussing the effects of remote work, and agreeing it’s OK to ignore the frontend dev scene for awhile.

Chris Coyier on some of the new(ish) CSS compilers (such as Assembler) and how they’re flipping the script:

The popular Tailwind framework supports it. It kind of flips the mental model of Tailwind on its head, to me. Rather than providing a huge pile of CSS utility classes to use — then “purging” what is unused — it only creates what it needs to begin with.

JavaScript-free and built (poetically) on top of XP.css (whence Longhorn Vista?)