css

Fake centered fixed width

What: Say the background of your website is white and you want, for example, a different color header, full width, with content inside the header that’s contained at a lesser width, and centered. Common enough scenario and usually created with one HTML-element (div, section, …) at full width and with a colored background and one HTML-element (div, article, …) with a fixed width and centered, holding the content.

Read moreFake centered fixed width

Hooray for text-decoration: underline!

For years the first thing I would do on a new project is add a { text-decoration: none; } in some form or other to the styling of any website. However I was going to make links look, I was not leaving that offensive-looking text-decoration:underline; in place.

But text-decoration is growing up and browser support for the new options is improving, including, for example, the increased support in the recent release of Firefox 70.

My favorite feature is that underline can skip glyphs now, if you want! Followed almost immediately by my second favorite feature: text-underline-offset: <length>; There are more options than just <length>, read more on text-underline-offset here at MDN web docs. Between these two text-decoration: underline; can actually look classy.

Unfortunately, support for text-underline-offset is even less: Firefox and Safari at the moment. Glyph skipping specifically is supported much better with text-decoration-skip-ink in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. And most browsers now support a shorthand version of text-decoration which can also set color. Lovely!

Read more about all of it at MDN web docs.

Photo by Photos by Lanty on Unsplash

:last-of-type but only if it meets other conditions as well

.gallery-item:nth-of-type(3n+2):last-of-type

I was working on a gallery with rows of 3 items per row for which the markup contained <br> after every third .gallery-item and the CSS used floats. It didn’t look how I wanted it to and needed to change it anyway, so I decided to also get rid of the floats and break-tags and use display: flex instead.

Read more:last-of-type but only if it meets other conditions as well

Transition on hover

What: If you put a transition on the :hover instead of on the :link, it only transitions one way. If you put the transition on the :link, it will transition each way. Usually this is exactly what you want because once you move the cursor off the link, the effect will be gradually transitioned back instead of being removed abruptly.

Photo by Hello I’m Nik 🇬🇧 on Unsplash

Yes, I Still Print Webpages

It’s been years since I had to make a print version of a webpage and support for page-break-before and page-break-after in Chrome seems to have improved in the mean time–even if I’m really supposed to switch to break-after (support for that seems to be lacking in Chrome, Edge, Safari and Internet Explorer).

I knew floats could cripple page breaks but I wasn’t using any floats so I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t working…

Read moreYes, I Still Print Webpages

Spacing in CSS pseudo-element content

A bit of an abstract title but I’m basically taking about:

h4::after {
    content: "";
}

If you have just text in the content property, you can adjust spacing with the letter-spacing and/or word-spacing properties in CSS. Letter-spacing would even work if you have just icons but I had a combination of three icons and a word, and the letter-spacing I wanted between the icons pulled the letters of the word too far apart. You can’t use html in the content property of a pseudo-element like ::before or :: after, so &nbsp; is out.

Read moreSpacing in CSS pseudo-element content

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