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Quick Hit #11

August 21st, 2024 No comments

Hey look at that, the State of CSS Survey for 2024 is open and taking submissions.


Quick Hit #11 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

The Intersection of Speed and Proximity

August 21st, 2024 No comments
A closeup of three lanes of tight traffic from behind.

You ever find yourself in bumper-to-bumper traffic? I did this morning on the way to work (read: whatever cafe I fancy). There’s a pattern to it, right? Stop, go, stop, go, stop… it’s almost rhythmic and harmonious in the most annoying of ways. Everyone in line follows the dance, led by some car upfront, each subsequent vehicle pressed right up to the rear of the next for the luxury of moving a few feet further before the next step.

Photo by Jakob Jin

Have you tried breaking the pattern? Instead of playing shadow to the car in front of me this morning, I allowed space between us. I’d gradually raise my right foot off the brake pedal and depress the gas pedal only once my neighboring car gained a little momentum. At that point, my car begins to crawl. And continue crawling. I rarely had to tap the brakes at all once I got going. In effect, I had sacrificed proximity for a smoother ride. I may not be traveling the “fastest” in line, but I was certainly gliding along with a lot less friction.

I find that many things in life are like that. Getting closest to anything comes with a cost, be it financial or consequence. Want the VIP ticket to a concert you’re stoked as heck about? Pony up some extra cash. Want the full story rather than a headline? Just enter your email address. Want up-to-the-second information in your stock ticker? Hand over some account information. Want access to all of today’s televised baseball games? Pick up an ESPN+ subscription.

Proximity and speed are the commodities, the products so to speak. Closer and faster are what’s being sold.

You may have run into the “law of diminishing returns” in some intro-level economics class you took in high school or college. It’s the basis for a large swath of economic theory but in essence, is the “too much of a good thing” principle. It’s what AMPM commercials have been preaching this whole time.

I’m embedding the clip instead of linking it up because it clearly illustrates the “problem” of having too many of what you want (or need). Dude resorted to asking two teens to reach into his front pocket for his wallet because his hands were full, creeper. But buy on, the commercial says, because the implication is that there’s never too much of a good thing, even if it ends in a not-so-great situation chockfull of friction.

The only and only thing I took away from physics in college — besides gravity force being 9.8 m/s2 — is that there’s no way to have bigger, cheaper, and faster at the same time. You can take two, but all three cannot play together. For example, you can have a spaceship that’s faster and cheaper, but chances are that it ain’t gonna be bigger than a typical spaceship. If you were to aim for bigger, it’d be a lot less cheap, not only for the extra size but also to make the dang heavy thing go as fast as possible. It’s a good rule in life. I don’t have proof of it, but I’d wager Mick Jagger lives by it, or at least did at one time.

Speed. Proximity. Faster and slower. Closer and further. I’m not going to draw any parallels to web development, UX design, or any other front-end thing. They’re already there.


The Intersection of Speed and Proximity originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

Elastic Overflow Scrolling

August 21st, 2024 No comments

A client asked if we could mimic the “rubber band” scrolling behavior on many mobile devices. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. It’s a behavior that already exists and happens automatically in most browsers. In iOS Safari, for example, you’re allowed to scroll beyond the top or bottom edge of the viewport by a few hundred pixels, and letting go snaps the page back in place.

I had heard of some instances where someone might want to prevent the bounce from happening but no one had asked me to implement it, especially in a way that supports devices without a touch interface. I was actually a bit surprised there isn’t an existing CSS property for this. There’s the non-standard -webkit-overflow-scrolling property but that’s for a different type of “momentum” scrolling. Nor would I want to rely on a non-standard property that’s not on track to become part of the specifications.

OK, so what if we want to force this sort of rubber banding in our work? For starters, we’d need some sort of element acting as a container for content that requires scrolling. From there, we could reach for JavaScript, of course, but that involves adding scroll listeners or a combination of pointerDown, pointerUp, and pointerMove events, not to mention keeping track of positions, inertial movement, etc.

A CSS-only solution would be much more ideal.

Here is a container with a few child elements:

<div class="carousel">
  <div class="slides">
    <div class="slide">1</div>
    <div class="slide">2</div>
    <div class="slide">3</div>
    <div class="slide">4</div>
    <div class="slide">5</div>
  </div>
</div>

Let’s get some baseline styles in place, specifically to create a situation where we’re guaranteed to overflow a parent container.

/* Parent container with fixed dimensions for overflow */
.carousel {
  width: 200px;
  height: 400px;
  overflow-x: hidden;
  overflow-y: auto;
}

/* Wrapper for slides, stacked in a column */
.slides {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  width: 100%;
  height: fit-content;
}

/* Each slide is the full width of the carousel */
.slide {
  width: 100%;
  aspect-ratio: 1;
}

Let’s start by adding some vertical margins. If your container has only one long item, add it to the top and bottom of the child element. If the container has multiple children, you’ll want to add margin to the top of the first child element and the bottom of the last child element.

.carousel > .slides > .slide:first-child {
  margin-top: 100px;
}

.carousel > .slides > .slide:last-child {
  margin-bottom: 100px;
}

Great! We can now scroll past the edges, but we need something to snap it back after the user lifts their finger or pointer. For this, we’ll need the scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-align properties

.carousel {
  scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;
}

.carousel > .slides > .slide {
  scroll-snap-align: start;
}

.carousel > .slides > .slide:first-child {
  margin-top: 100px;
}

.carousel > .slides > .slide:last-child {
  scroll-snap-align: end;
  margin-bottom: 100px;
}

Note that the same applies to a horizontally scrolling element. For that, you’d change things up so that margin is applied to the element’s left and right edges instead of its top and bottom edges. You’ll also want to change the scroll-snap-type property’s value from y mandatory to x mandatory while you’re at it.

That’s really it! Here’s the final demo:

CodePen Embed Fallback

I know, I know. This isn’t some Earth-shattering or mind-blowing effect, but it does solve a very specific situation. And if you find yourself in that situation, now you have something in your back pocket to use.

Additional resources


Elastic Overflow Scrolling originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

RTL Styling 101

August 20th, 2024 No comments
Side-by-side comparison of letter spacing on Gecko and Blink/Webkit

A couple of weeks ago I was super excited about publishing my first CSS-Tricks post: “Letter Spacing is Broken. Forget about that though, what’s important is the post’s topic: letter spacing is broken and doesn’t work as the CSS Specification says it should. In a nutshell, instead of spacing the characters evenly, it leaves an unpleasant space at the end of the element.

While this inconsistency between the web and the spec is just a quirk for a Spanish/English speaker like me, for speakers of right-to-left (RTL) languages like Arabic or Hebrew, an annoying space is left at the start or end of a word. Firefox (Gecko) kinda fixes it and rearranges the unnecessary space at the end (in the reading order), but Google and Safari (Blink and Webkit) leave it at the start.

Of course, I wanted to demo this major pain point, but styling RTL content was beyond my CSS power. That’s when I found this life-saver guide by Ahmad Shadeed that covers every major aspect of styling RTL content on the web and best practices to easily internationalize an LTR webpage. A resource that, I think, is a must-read if you are interested in i18n and accessibility in the web.

I may have discovered warm water since this guide goes back to 2018, but I hope those like me who didn’t know about it have fun learning something new!


RTL Styling 101 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

On the Ground at Frostapalooza

August 19th, 2024 No comments
Full lineup of musicians who performed at Frostapalooza.

Photos! Videos!