I really like the way that the thinking here is tied back to Bert Bos’s original design principles for CSS.
This is a deep dive into the future of CSS layout—make a cup of tea and settle in for some good nerdiness!
Rachel responds to Jen’s recent post with the counter-argument; why masonry should be separate from grid.
I’m not entirely convinced. We heard performance issues as a reason why we could never have container queries or :has, but here we are. And the syntax for a separate masonry spec borrows so heavily from grid that it smells of redundancy.
This is a wonderful in-depth article by Jen, with lots of great demos.
She makes a very strong case for masonry layouts being part of the grid spec (I’m convinced!). If you have strong feelings one way or the other, get involved
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
This is a terrific interactive explainer!
Michelle has written a detailed practical guide to container queries here.
What a beautiful website!
This is a terrrific presentation by Chris, going through some practical implementations of modern CSS: logical properties, viewport units, grid, subgrid, container queries, cascade layers, new colour spaces, and view transitions.
Instead of thinking about responsive design in terms of media queries, I like to think of responsive design in these categories.
- Responsive to the content
- Responsive to the viewport
- Responsive to the container
- Responsive to the user preferences
All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.
James describes his process for designing fluid grid layouts, which very much involves working with the grain of the web but against the grain of our design tools:
In 2022 our design tools are still based around fixed-size artboards, while we’re trying to design products which scale gracefully to suit any screen.
This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!
Okay, combining flex-basis and clamp() is pretty cool!
A terrific tour of just some of the fantastic ways you can use :has() in CSS.
The section on using it with sibling selectors blew my mind:
How often have you wanted to adjust the margins on a headline based on the element following it? Now it’s easy. This code allows us to select any h2 with a p immediately after it.
h2:has(+ p) { margin-bottom: 0; }Amazing.
The algorithm I’m going after is pretty simple: If the grid of items has an odd number of items, then make the first item full-width. But CSS can’t do logic… right? Well… hold my proverbial beer.
Some interesting thoughts from Tim here. What if CSS could “displace” design decisions from one area to another?
For example, a flexible line spacing value in one container could influence margins that surround the text block. That change in spaciousness may mean that nearby headings need size or spacing adjustments to stay feeling connected.
This feels like the complete opposite way that most people approach design systems—modular, componentised, and discrete—but very in-line with the way that CSS has been designed—interconnected, relational and cascading.
To complement her talk at Beyond Tellerrand, Stephanie goes through some of the powerful CSS features that enable intrinsic web design. These are all great tools for the declarative design approach I was talking about:
This is a great little tip from Eric for those situations when you want an element to be centred but you want the content inside that element to remain uncentred:
max-inline-size: max-content;
margin-inline: auto;
And I completely concur with his closing thoughts on CSS today:
It’s a nice little example of the quiet revolution that’s been happening in CSS of late. Hard things are becoming easy, and more than easy, simple. Simple in the sense of “direct and not complex”, not in the sense of “obvious and basic”. There’s a sense of growing maturity in the language, and I’m really happy to see it.
This one-page site that Andy has made to illustrate his talk at All Day Hey is exactly what I was talking about with declarative design.
Give the browser some solid rules and hints, then let it make the right decisions for the people that visit it, based on their device, connection quality and capabilities. This is how they will get a genuinely great user experience, rather than a fragmented, broken one.
Josh is great at explaining tricky concepts and here he’s really set himself a challenge: explaining layout modes in CSS.