An Interactive Guide to CSS Container Queries
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
Link tags: sizing
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Utopia WCAG warnings | Trys Mudford
Wouldn’t it be great if all web tools gave warnings like this?
As you generate and tweak your type scale, Utopia will now warn you if any steps fail WCAG SC 1.4.4, and tell you between which viewports the problem lies.
Designing better target sizes
This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.
Intent to Ship: Auto Sizes for Lazy Loaded Images with Srcset
Remember when I wrote about sizes="auto"? Well, it’s coming to Chrome! Hallelujah!
Getting started with CSS container queries | MDN Blog
Michelle has written a detailed practical guide to container queries here.
Some simple ways to make content look good - Set Studio
This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.
The Guide To Responsive Design In 2023 and Beyond - Ahmad Shadeed
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
clamp() Calculator · Chris Burnell
Like a little mini Utopia:
Handy little tool for calculating viewport-based clamped values.
Why you should never use px to set font-size in CSS - Josh Collinsworth blog
Reminder:
emandremwork with the user’s font size;pxcompletely overrides it.
Building the new Utopia homepage | Trys Mudford
Trys has written up how he made that nifty little resizing widget on the Utopia homepage.
Fluid type sizes and spacing — Piper Haywood
Prompted by Utopia, Piper shares her methodology for fluid type in Sass.
A short history of body copy sizes on the Web
A look at the trend towards larger and larger font sizes for body copy on the web, culminating with Resilient Web Design.
There are some good arguments here for the upper limit on the font size there being too high, so I’ve adjusted it slightly. Now on large screens, the body copy on Resilient Web Design is 32px (2 times 1em), down from 40px (2.5 times 1em).
Content-based grid tracks and embracing flexibility
This is a really good explanation of the difference between context-aware layouts—that we’ve had up until now—and content-aware layouts, which are now possible with CSS grid:
With the
min-content,max-contentandautokeywords, we can size grid tracks based on their content. I think this is very cool. If we manage to embrace as much of the web’s flexibility as we can, we can get the most out of these tools, and let CSS help us with designing for the unknown.
Monotype restored the font Walbaum, a 200-year-old serif typeface — Quartzy
The history and restoratin of a neglected typeface, complete with this great explanation of optical sizing:
Nix illustrated the point with an analogy: “Imagine if we all decided that 10-year-old boys would be the optimal human form,” he says. “Rather than having babies, we just shrunk 10-year-old boys to baby size, and enlarge them to the size of a full grown man. That’s kind of what we’re combatting.”
Keeping aspect-ratio with HTML and no padding tricks
A clever little hack to preserve an aspect ratio for any HTML element.
We use two important attributes:
- SVG knows how to maintain aspect ratio
- CSS grid knows how to make overlapping items affect each other’s size
How the minmax() Function Works
A great description of one of the most powerful features in CSS Grid.
This function opens the door to us being able to write much more powerful and succinct CSS by allowing us to set, as a value for a grid track, a function including both a minimum and maximum value.
The Unexpected Power of Viewport Units in CSS | Lullabot
A nice rundown of some of the fun you can have with viewport units.
I’m very glad the problems with vh units I wrote about a little while back is getting fixed in Chrome for mobile.
Building Resizeable Components with Relative CSS Units | CSS-Tricks
A thorough and compelling demonstration of why it makes sense to size all the properties of your components—font size, margins, borders, etc.—in ems or rems rather than mixing in pixels for some properties. It’s all about the scalability, innit?
Google’s authentication-less, on-the-fly image resizing service
Did you know Google runs a free an open image resizing service?
I did not! This could be quite useful. Seeing as it’s an https endpoint, it could be especially useful on https sites that pull images from http domains (and avoid those mixed-content warnings).
* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW « Paul Irish
Paul quite rightly sings the praises of box-sizing: border-box — this is something that Microsoft got right and the spec got wrong. I never thought of making it part of a universal reset though.