Anchor position tool

Revealing ‘back to top’ button

Such a clever minimalist use of CSS!

Hybrid positioning with CSS variables and max() – Lea Verou

Yet another clever technique from Lea. But I’m also bookmarking this one because of something she points out about custom properties:

The browser doesn’t know if your property value is valid until the variable is resolved, and by then it has already processed the cascade and has thrown away any potential fallbacks.

That explains an issue I was seeing recently! I couldn’t understand why an older browser wasn’t getting the fallback I had declared earlier in the CSS. Turns out that custom properties mess with that expectation.

Getting Started With CSS Layout — Smashing Magazine

Rachel gives a terrific explanation of CSS layout from first principles, starting with the default normal flow within writing systems, moving on to floats, then positioning—relative, absolute, fixed, and sticky—then flexbox, and finally grid (with a coda on alignment). This is a great primer to keep bookmarked; I think I’ll find myself returning to this more than once.

I wasted a day on CSS selector performance to make a website load 2ms faster | Trys Mudford

Picture me holding Trys back and telling him, “Leave it alone, mate, it’s not worth it!”

Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence

It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.

This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.