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There’s some interesting CSS trickery in Jason Pamental’s latest Web Fonts & Typography News. Jason wanted to bring swipeable columns to his digital book experience on mobile. Which brings up an interesting question right away… how do you set full-width columns that add columns horizontally, as-needed ? Well that’s a good trick right there, and it’s a one-liner:

columns: 100vw auto;

But it gets more complicated and disappointing from there.

With just a smidge more formatting to the columns:

main {
  columns: 100vw auto;
  column-gap: 2rem;
  overflow-x: auto;
  height: calc(100vh - 2rem);
  font: 120%/1.4 Georgia;
}

We get this:

Which is so close to being perfect!

We probably wouldn’t apply this effect on desktop, but hey, that’s what media queries are for. On mobile we get…

That herky-jerky scrolling makes this a bad experience right there. We can smooth that out with -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;…

The smoothness is maybe better, but the fact that the columns don’t snap into place makes it almost just as bad of a reading experience. That’s what scroll-snap is for, but alas:

Unfortunately it turns out you need a block-level element to which you can snap, and the artificially-created columns don’t count as such.

Oh noooooo. So close! But so far!

If we actually want scroll snapping, the content will need to be in block-level elements (like

main {
  display: flex;
}
main > div {
  flex: 0 0 100vw;
}