css posts page 2

CSS: checking support for selectors

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@supports is a good way to apply an entire block of styles only if (modern) browsers support a particular property-value combo. There is no similar block-level mechanism for selector support. Selectors are automatically ignored if their values or syntax aren’t recognized by the browser, so they basically already do this at the ruleset level.

Except, sometimes you want to apply styles to other elements that don’t use the selector, but only if the browser supports the selector.

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CSS: inner border grid list with grid layout

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A couple years ago, I wrote a post titled “CSS: Inner Border Grid List” about solutions to a problem I was having. The post is not about CSS grid layout, but recent interest in the post leads me to believe people are visiting expecting it to be. In the interest of serving those visitors, I decided to create a solution using the now well supported spec.

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Duplicate selectors: Increase specificity without being more specific

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CSS has a concept of specificity wherein more “specific” selectors take precedence over less specific. Sometimes specificity rules cause a set of property values to be applied while another is desired. This can result in the developer increasing specificity on the desired set to outweigh the other set. When I’ve needed extra specificity, I’ve often use an ‘html’ class on the <html> element or a ‘body’ class on the <body> element. The downsides of are it:

  • is more specific, as in precise, meaning the selector won’t match in a document without those helper classes.
  • has a performance penalty for needing to check a(nother) parent element of the target element.
  • only allows one more unit of specificity at the class level for each parent used.

Today (yesterday), I found a better way that can add any amount of class level specificity (weight) without being more specific (precise), thanks to CSS Wizardry. I’ve been doing this CSS thing for a while, but I hadn’t realized .foo.foo would match <div class="foo">. In essence, you can duplicate a selector and chain it onto itself to create an equivalent selector, but with double the specificity. You can duplicate it as many times as needed to get the desired specificity, e.g. .foo.foo.foo.foo to override .foo.foo.foo, without requiring any parent selectors. Besides the benefits already mentioned, it could be seen as more explicit in its purpose than using parent elements, because there is no other reason to do it. I will have to start using this.

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There must’ve been a flexbox bug in Firefox 45. Today, it was brought to my attention that nav was getting cut off on a site. I added a flex-shrink: 0 to ensure the logo shrank to accommodate, fixing the problem in Safari, but not Firefox. Thinking it odd that Firefox was behaving so differently from other browsers, I decided to check for an update, and 46 happened to be available. After updating, the problem disappeared. I’ve ran into browser bugs with flexbox before.

CSS: Inner Border Grid List

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[note]This post is not about the grid layout spec, but I have created a solution using it to solve the same problem this post is solving.[/note]

Many of the recent designs at Cogneato have had a responsive grid list of items that have a border between them. By grid I’m meaning like an image or product grid where the items flow horizontally and then wrap and are all the same width. By inner border I’m meaning a border around each item except the edges that don’t touch another item. See a more complicated example that uses sub-grids. My solutions thus far haven’t been ideal. But I recently thought of and found some solutions that, when combined, make for a better option.

The biggest difficulty with this type of situation can be getting the items on the same row to be the same height so that all borders meet up. I have been either requiring a fixed height for the items or using JavaScript to equalize the heights on a given row (which of course has to be rerun upon screen resize). The fixed height option means content creators are forced to limit how much content they put in each item or it will be clipped. There is also the potential for extra whitespace when there is less content. Considering the JavaScript option, I definitely try to avoid having the presentation depend on JavaScript. It is a potential performance issue as it has to continuously poll for browser resize and update the height when it changes.

position: absolute

Every time I build this sort of thing, I desire a better solution, but have limited time, and settle on my previous solutions. When doing the most recent site with this sort of grid, I theorized a solution taking advantage of a few other tricks, and later implemented it in my off time. The most important was my relatively recent discovery of how position: absolute with auto works.

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Responsively Changing Date Formats

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At times in developing a responsive site, the content that is shown needs to change depending on the viewport. One might want to show a hamburger icon instead of a menu on a small viewport or display extra less critical content on a larger viewport. I recently had to show a more verbose format on wide viewports (like “Tuesday June 8, 2014”) and a less verbose date format (like “Tue Jun 8, 2014”) on a narrow viewport to make things fit well. I didn’t like the options I’ve used in the past. I didn’t want to have duplicate content in my raw markup, to need to inject HTML elements into generated date strings, or to involve JavaScript. I tried fixing the width of a wrapper and hiding the rest, but with the non-monospaced font, it didn’t work the same for all cases.

So I did some looking for other options. I found a discussion of a technique that seemed fairly elegant. I had been reluctant to use it in the past because of browser support and just being a bit uncomfortable with it. The technique makes use of the attr() expression to inject content. Since any browsers that support media queries should support attr() and I was using this in a media query, I thought it worth it to embrace it finally. I liked the results and will probably make more use of it in the future, especially since the browsers that don’t support it now have low enough market share to almost ignore.

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