Take State of CSS 2022 survey A while ago I posted a call for feedback to inform the design of the State of CSS 2022 survey. The response has been overwhelming and it was glorious. We got quite a lot of proposals, feedback, votes. But that also meant we had to make some tough decisions about what ge...

I always thought that the semantically appropriate way to represent a rating (e.g. a star rating) is a <meter> element. They essentially convey the same type of information, the star rating is just a different presentation. An example of a star rating widget, from Amazon However, trying to style a <...

Since 2019, the annual State of CSS survey has collected feedback from web developers from across the world to try and take the pulse of the CSS ecosystem, and it’s become a valuable resource not only for CSS developers, but also for browser vendors. This summer, one of my side projects is helping o...

A few days ago I asked Twitter a seemingly simple question (I meant aria-pressed, not aria-selected but Twitter doesn’t allow edits…): https://twitter.com/LeaVerou/status/1545712667515654144 For background, I was implementing a web component for an app I’m working on at work and I was getting into s...

I recently spoke at CSS Day in Amsterdam. It was only my second f2f talk after the pandemic. It went down really well, both in person, and recently that the video was released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuZizqDF4q8 Here is a sample of tweets about it that made me particularly warm and fuzzy in...

Related: Chris’ blog post for the release of Color.js This post has been long overdue: Chris and I started working on Color.js in 2020, over 2 years ago! It was shortly after I had finished the Color lecture for the class I was teaching at MIT and I was appalled by the lack of color libraries that d...

This week has been Yak Shaving Galore. It went a bit like this: I’ve been working on a web component that I need for the project I’m working on. More on that later, but let’s call it <x-foo> for now. Of course that needs to be developed as a separate reusable library and released as a separate open ...

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...

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...

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 act...

(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, initi...

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 { --primar...

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. Bliss is essentially a collection of helper functions. Most of these f...

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...

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 Workin...

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...

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 f...

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 --i...

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 slider...

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 fin...

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...

For some of the statistics we are going to study for this year’s Web Almanac we may end up needing a list of CSS shorthands and their longhands. Now this is typically done by maintaining a data structure by hand or guessing based on property name structure. But I knew that if we were going to do it ...

In case you haven’t heard, ECMAScript modules (ESM) are now supported everywhere! While I do have some gripes with them, it’s too late for any of these things to change, so I’m embracing the good parts and have cautiously started using them in new projects. I do quite like that I can just use import...

First off, some news: I agreed to be this year’s CSS content lead for the Web Almanac! One of the first things to do is to flesh out what statistics we should study to answer the question “What is the state of CSS in 2020?”. You can see last year’s chapter to get an idea of what kind of statistics c...

Many of today’s web crafters were not writing CSS at the time Alex Walker’s landmark article The Cicada Principle and Why it Matters to Web Designers was published in 2011. Last I heard of it was in 2016, when it was used in conjunction with blend modes to pseudo-randomize backgrounds even further. ...

Chinese translation by Coink Wang Now that optional chaining is supported across the board, I decided to finally refactor Mavo to use it (yes, yes, we do provide a transpiled version as well for older browsers, settle down). This is a moment I have been waiting for a long time, as I think optional c...

Notice how the navigation on the left behaves wrt scrolling: It’s like absolute at first that becomes fixed once the header scrolls out of the viewport. One of my side projects these days is a color space agnostic color conversion & manipulation library, which I’m developing together with my husband...

It has been almost a decade since this blog last saw a redesign. This blog’s theme 2011 - 2020. RIP! In these 9 years, my life changed dramatically. I joined and left W3C, joined the CSS WG, went to MIT for a PhD, published a book, got married, had a baby, among other things. I designed dozens of we...

Today I tried to help a friend who is a great computer scientist, but not a JS person use a JS module he found on Github. Since for the past 6 years my day job is doing usability research & teaching at MIT, I couldn’t help but cringe at the slog that this was. Lo and behold, a pile of unnecessary er...

I was always interested in color science. In 2014, I gave a talk about CSS Color 4 at various conferences around the world called “The Chroma Zone”. Even before that, in 2009, I wrote a color picker that used a hidden Java applet to support ICC color profiles to do CMYK properly, a first on the Web ...