Karen Menezes works towards an open, adaptive web that is accessible to all. She has an inexplicable love for CSS and responsive user interfaces. In her downtime, she loves urban gardening, dancing, cooking and filing CSS browser bugs. You can connect with her here.
Using a preprocessor does not automatically upgrade one’s code: A thorough foundation in CSS is a prerequisite. In Karen Menezes’ experience, badly architected and overly abstracted preprocessor code is much harder to debug and maintain than a large CSS file created with basic structure and common sense. Variables can be seen as the backbone of a well-constructed project. Well-commented and well-defined variables set a great foundation for a project of any size. By maintaining a variable-centric approach, we can structure our style sheets with a meaning and modularity that persist beyond the trends that come and go.
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With CSS’ clip-path property you will begin to think outside the box, literally, and hexagons, stars and octagons will begin to take form on your web pages. Once you get your hands dirty with clip-path, there’s no end to the shapes you can generate, simply by tweaking a few values. In this article, Karen Menezes will provide demos referenced to an inline SVG, in order to gain additional support on Firefox. Generating a responsive SVG clipped shape is trivial once you have created a responsive shape with CSS’ clip-path. We’ll look at this in detail later.
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Flex items are truly accommodating and a pleasure to work with. Most web apps consist of a series of modular, reusable components. You can use flexbox for those bits of layout that induce headaches and that depend on brittle CSS hacks to work. It takes a while to have your “Aha!” moment with flexbox, because it involves unlearning what you already know about CSS layouting. But once you speak the flexbox language fluently, your process of designing responsive apps will become effortless and your style sheets will get leaner!
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