Chris’ Corner: CSS Deep Cuts

Sometimes we gotta get into the unglamorous parts of CSS. I mean *I* think they are pretty glamorous: new syntax, new ideas, new code doing foundational and important things. I just mean things that don’t demo terribly well. Nothing is flying across the screen, anyway.

• The Future of CSS: Construct <custom-ident> and <dashed-ident> values with ident() by Bramus Van Damme — When you go anchor-name: --name; the --name part is a custom property, right? No. It is a “custom ident”. It doesn’t have a value, it’s just a name. Things get more interesting with ident() as a function, which can help us craft them from other attributes and custom properties, making for much less repetitive code in some situations.
• Beating !important user agent styles (sort of) by Noah Liebman — Using !important is a pretty hardcore way for a rule to apply, made even more hardcore when used by a low level stylesheet, of which user agent styles are the lowest. So is it even possible to beat a style set that way? Click to find out.
• Here’s Why Your Anchor Positioning Isn’t Working by James Stuckey Weber — There is a whole host of reasons why including DOM positioning and order. If you ask Una she’ll say it’s probably the inset property.
• Faux Containers in CSS Grids by Tyler Sticka — Elements that stick out of their “container” is a visually compelling look. A classic way to do it is with negative margins and absolute positioning and the like. But those things are a smidge “dangerous” in that they can cause overlaps and unexpected behavior due to being out of regular flow. I like Tyler’s idea here of keeping it all contained to a grid and just making it look like it’s breaking out.
• Introducing @bramus/style-observer, a MutationObserver for CSS by Bramus Van Damme — A regular MutationObserver watches the DOM for changes. But not style changes. Bramus has created a version of it that does, thanks to a very newfangled CSS property that helps it work efficiently. I’m not overflowing with use case ideas, but I have a feeling that when you need it, you need it.
• Using the upcoming CSS when/else rules by Christiana Uloma — There is a working draft spec for @when/@else so while these aren’t real right now, maybe they will be? The if() function seems more real and maybe that is enough here? The if() function would just be a value though not a whole block of stuff, so maybe we’ll get both.