Matthias has a good solution for dealing with the behaviour of CSS custom properties I wrote about: first set your custom properties with the fallback and then use feature queries (@supports) to override those values.
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.
A terrific piece by Hidde, about CSS grid, but also about a much bigger question:
I don’t think we owe it to any users to make it all exactly the same. Therefore we can get away with keeping fallbacks very simple. My hypothesis: users don’t mind, they’ve come for the content.
If users don’t mind, that leaves us with team members, bosses and clients. In my ideal world we should convince each other, and with that I mean visual designers, product owners, brand people, developers, that it is ok for our lay-out not to look the same everywhere. Because serving good-looking content everywhere is more important than same grids everywhere.
Following on from Charlie’s experiment last year, Chris Ashton has been assessing which sites rely on JavaScript, and which sites use it in a more defensive, resilient way. Some interesting results in here.
A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Progressive enhancement means more robust experiences, with fewer bugs in production and fewer individual browser quirks, because we’re letting the platform do the job rather than trying to write it all from scratch.
Una has put together this handy one-pager of flexbox fallbacks for some common grid layouts.
The gorgeous website for this year’s Ampersand conference might well be one of the first commercial uses of variable fonts in the wild. Here, Richard documents all the clever things Mark did to ensure good fallbacks for browsers that don’t yet support variable fonts.
A nice look at the fallbacks that are built into CSS.