Home > Designing, Others > Creating CSS APIs without JavaScript With the datasette-css-properties plugin

Creating CSS APIs without JavaScript With the datasette-css-properties plugin

Simon Willison has a project called Datasette, an open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data. I’m not sure I’m qualified to explain it, but it’s like a tool to make handling data easier and doing more — through the web — with data you have. Like making that data queryable and giving it an API.

I would think, typically, you’d get the results of an API call against your data in something useful, like JSON. But Simon made a plugin that outputs the results as CSS custom properties instead, and blogged it:

It’s very, very weird—it adds a .css output extension to Datasette which outputs the result of a SQL query using CSS custom property format. This means you can display the results of database queries using pure CSS and HTML, no JavaScript required!

Here’s what I said just recently in “Custom Properties as State”:

This makes me think that a CDN-hosted CSS file like this could have other useful stuff, like today’s date for usage in pseudo content, or other special time-sensitive stuff. Maybe the phase of the moon? Sports scores?! Soup of the day?!

And Simon is like, how about roadside attractions?

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My brain automatically worries about the accessibility of that, but… aren’t pseudo-elements fairly and reliably read in screen readers these days? You still can’t select the text though, or find-on-page, which are both usability and accessibility issues, so don’t consider this like a real thing that you really do for production work with unknown users.

His blog post demonstrates a slightly more dynamic example where the time of day outputs a different color. That makes me think of @property and declaring types for custom properties. I think this gets a smidge more useful when you can use the values that come back as specific syntaxes.


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