These days, there is a lengthy discussion in the CSS WG about how to name a function that produces shades of gray (from white to black) with varying degrees of transparency, and we need your feedback about which name is easier to use. The current proposals are: 1. gray(lightness [, alpha]) In this p...

As a few of you know, I have been spending a good part of this year writing a book for O’Reilly called “CSS Secrets” (preorder here!). I wanted to include a “secret” about the various uses of the resize property, as it’s one of my favorite underdogs, since it rarely gets any love. However, just ment...

Today, I was giving the opening keynote at Codemania in Auckland, New Zealand. It was a talk about color from a math/dev perspective. It went quite well, despite my complete lack of sleep. I mean that quite literally: I hadn’t slept all night. No, it wasn’t the jetlag or the nervousness that kept me...

Last year, I did something crazy, that I’ve been wanting to do since I was little: I applied to MIT’s PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It was not only crazy because I have been working for several years already, but also because I only applied to MIT, as I decided I did no...

I’ve been interested in digital color for a long time, and this year I decided to risk giving a technical talk about color some of the conferences I’m speaking at. “Why is that risky?” you might ask. Well, it might end up being really interesting, or it may end up alienating both designers because i...

I was excited and surprised to find out I’ve been in the 10 finalists for two (2!) categories in the net awards this year: Outstanding contribution Conference Talk of the Year (for The humble border-radius) You can vote for me by clicking the above links and have my eternal gratitude :-) Furthermore...

When a CSS animation is applied from the beginning of the page load, things are easy. You just use the animation property with appropriate parameters, and you’re done. However, what if the animation is applied on a certain state, e.g. :hover, :active, :focus or a JS-triggered class change? A naïve a...

I guess this will not be useful to many, but thought I’d open source it anyway, in case someone else finds it useful. I mostly wrote it because after 50+ conferences, I got seriously fed up updating the list by editing the HTML manually. Now I will only have to edit a JSON file manually! :P Admitted...

Quite often people assume that because the language I focus on is CSS, I must be a web designer. Don’t get me wrong, I love visual design with a passion. I have studied it a lot over the years and I’ve worked on several design projects for clients. Heck, I even have a dribbble profile! However, if I...

For some reason, I seem to have a fascination with CSS loaders these days. After recreating the Google loader with clean CSS recently, I set off to recreate the classic spinner with CSS. Yes, I know this has been done zillions of times, but I wanted a clean, maintainable, reusable solution, not just...

So, for a while I had noticed the nice sutble loader Google apps use and I was wondering if it would be easy to make with CSS and CSS animations: Yesterday, I realised that you can get this effect by increasing border size until about the middle of the element, as long as the total width stays the s...

Not sure if I’m the first to come up with this idea, but I searched and didn’t find anything. So, for a long time, I was wondering if there’s an easy way to create trapezoid shapes in CSS, especially with borders etc. Eventually, I realized that I could use a pseudo-element for the background and 3D...

I wish I could speak at CSSConf.eu, but unfortunately I had to decline the invitation, as it collided with a prior speaking engagement I had agreed on. I recently got another email from the organizers with an interesting question: We want to make this event as stress-free for our speakers as possibl...

About a year ago, I announced I was joining W3C as a full-time staff member, to work on Developer Relations and education. Working at W3C was a dream come true and I can’t say I was disappointed. Over the past year I’ve worked with some amazingly brilliant people, hopefully increased awareness for w...

Yesterday (Sunday) I was on a 9.5 hour flight from Canada with no inflight entertainment (well, thanks Air Canada), so I did what every bored human being would do instead of watching movies: I decided to code an app! And out of the infinite set of possible apps somebody can make, I decided to make a...

I recently realized that unprefixed gradients finally propagated to stable Chrome, and after tweeting about it, I decided to do some research on which browsers support unprefixed gradients, and what percentage of users needs them. Currently, unprefixed gradients are supported in: Chrome 26+ Firefox ...

Remember my previous post about an app I made to preview border-corner-shape? It stirred a lot of discussion in the CSS WG, and David Baron posted this: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css4-background/#border-corner-shape appears to me to be an example of a feature that’s addressing a problem that we don’t ...

As an editor of the Backgrounds & Borders Level 4 spec, I am naturally a bit more interested in the cool features it will bring, once implementations start (it’s currently too early for that). One of the coolest features in it is corner-shape. While in Backgrounds & Borders 3, border-radius was only...

These days, we have a number of different ways to vertically align text in a container of variable dimensions: Table display modes Flexbox inline-block hacks Wrapping the text in an extra element and absolutely positioning it …and probably many others I’m forgetting However, often comes a time when ...

These days, I’m working on the slides for my next talk, “The humble border-radius”. It will be about how much work is put into CSS features that superficially look as simple as border-radius, as well as what advances are in store for it in CSS Backgrounds & Borders 4 (of which I’m an editor). It wil...

I recently found myself looking at the Tools switch in Espresso: Not because I was going to use it (I rarely do), but because I started wondering what would be the best way to replicate this effect in CSS. I set on to create something that adhered to the following rules: It should be keyboard access...

You might have heard about W3Conf, W3C’s conference for web designers and developers. This year, I have the pleasure of not only speaking there but also organizing it, along with Doug Schepers and designing the website for it. Alongside with yours truly, it features an excellent lineup of amazing sp...

Last September, I was approached by Alex Duloz, who invited me to take part in his ambitious new venture, The Pastry Box Project. Its goal was to gather 30 people (“bakers”) every year who are influential in their field and ask them to share twelve thoughts — one per month. For 2012, that field woul...

This is a very quick tip, about a pet peeve of mine in almost every CSS animation I see. As you may know, I’m a sucker for reducing the amount of code (as long as it remains human readable of course). I demonstrated a very similar example in my “CSS in the 4th dimension” talk, but I recently realize...

I posted about this in both the WebPlatform.org blog and Dabblet’s blog, but I thought it might be interesting to many readers of this blog as well: As many of you probably know, I’ve started working for W3C Developer Relations since this August. Half of my time is devoted to WebPlatform.org, a very...

I was always interested in accessibility, but I never had to comply with any guidelines before. At W3C, accessibility is considered very important, so everything we make needs to pass WCAG 2.0 AA level. Therefore, I found myself calculating color contrast ratios very frequently. It was a very enligh...

I don’t usually like to advertise my talks or workshops through blog posts, and even though I’ve given a lot, I’ve only posted about less a handful. However, this one is special: It might be my last. Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE giving workshops, teaching people new things and seeing them put them in ...

In my recent post describing how I got into web development I wrote that I’m in the verge of some big changes in my life. The main one of them starts tomorrow. As of tomorrow, the above will be my professional email. Yes, you guessed it right; I’m joining the W3C team! Yes, the same W3C you all know...

For the past three weeks, on and off, I’ve been working on releasing Dabblet’s syntax highlighter as standalone, since many people had requested it. Zachary Forrest  suggested the name “Prism” and I liked it so much I decided to go with it, even though there is an abandoned Mozilla project with the ...

Those of you that have been following and/or using my work, are surely familiar with -prefix-free. Its promise was to let you write DRY code, without all the messy prefixes, that would be standards-compliant in the future (which is why I’m always against adding proprietary features in it, regardless...