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Can you get valid CSS property values from the browser?

I had someone write in with this very legit question. Lea just blogged about how you can get valid CSS properties themselves from the browser. That’s like this.

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That gives you, for example, the fact that cursor is a thing. But then how do you know what valid values are for cursor? We know from documentation that there are values like auto, none, help, context-menu, pointer, progress, wait, and many more.

But where does that list come from? Well, there is a list right in the spec so that’s helpful. But that doesn’t guarantee the complete list of values that any given browser actually supports. There could be cursor: skull-and-crossbones and we wouldn’t even know!

We can test by applying it to an element and looking in DevTools:

Damn.

But unless we launch a huge dictionary attack against that value, we don’t actually know what values it directly in-browser. Maybe Houdini will help somehow in browsers getting better at CSS introspection?

You can also use the CSS object to run tests like CSS.supports(property, value):

Damn.

You’d think we could have like CSS.validValues("text-decoration-thickness") and get like ["", "", "auto", "from-font"] or the like, but alas, not a thing.


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