CategoryCSS

May 1, 2018 — Printing pages directly from the browser is an experience that can lead to frustration with enormous images being printed out. We have covered print stylesheets in the past here on Smashing Magazine, but in this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the state of printing from the browser today. She will show you how you should include print styles in your web pages, and look at the specifications that really come into their own once printing. Read more…

April 16, 2018 — In some ways, we are all still so new to CSS Grid Layout. A lot of folks keep asking about best practices that are available out there. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to try and cover some of the things that either could be described as best practices, and some things that you probably don’t need to worry about. She will ran a survey and share the results as well as her personal thoughts. Read more…

April 9, 2018 — CSS Grid is important, really important. With it, we can now be as creative with layout on the web as we can in print, without compromising accessibility, responsiveness, or usability. If you’re at all serious about web design or development, you need to be serious about learning and using CSS Grid, too. In this article, Andrew Clarke will show you how to use one aspect, grid-template areas, an easy way of arranging elements. Read more…

March 29, 2018 — CSS Logical Properties and Values aren’t quite ready to be used yet, however learning about them can help you to understand CSS Layout, and the interaction with Writing Modes. In this article, Rachel Andrew  is going to explain how CSS is changing to support writing modes, and in doing so, she’ll clear up some of the things that might confuse you about Flexbox and Grid. Read more…

March 13, 2018 — It’s incredible to see how far web standards have come. Flash was one of the reasons a lot of folks started building websites. Flash was one of the reasons Simon Owen started building websites. It pioneered in a lot of areas, and this led to people creating amazing things with it. Over the years, it’s pushed the web forward a great deal. Adobe’s official announcement of dropping support of Flash, though, does raise concerns. Here are some of the groundbreaking things Flash could do back then, and how we can go about doing them today. Read more…

March 13, 2018 — Even if you don’t use any client-side JavaScript at all to build a site, it doesn’t mean you have to give up on the idea of building with components. Learn how to build a static site with the help of an HTML preprocessor. In this article, Chris Coyier will take a walk through a site he built recently using this technique. He used CodePen Projects to build it, which offers Nunjucks as a preprocessor, which was perfectly up for the job. Read more…

February 22, 2018 — Ever wondered how achieve styling of empty grid cells without adding redundant empty elements? Well, CSS Generated Content can help you do just that. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to take a look at how to use CSS Generated Content to achieve styling of empty cells without adding redundant empty elements and show some use cases where this technique makes sense. Read more…

February 5, 2018 — Do You Need A Media Query? The first rule of using media queries is to ask yourself if you really need to use a Media Query at all. In this article, Rachel Andrew will take a look at the use of media queries for responsive design today, how they work alongside Flexbox and Grid Layout, and also have a look at what is coming in the future. Read more…

January 18, 2018 — In part two of this two-part series, Brian Holt explains why large refactors are easy by using the Elm Compiler, how to handle side-effects, and how to work with JavaScript. He’ll work through large refactors by relying on the Elm compiler, and set up recurring events that interact with JavaScript to trigger drum samples. Elm has been the most invigorating language Brian has worked in lately. Using the Elm Architecture helps you focus on what matters to your users. Read more…

January 16, 2018 — Sometimes, you might wonder why something ends up the size that it is. Or, you might want to do something different to the default behavior. To do so, you need to know something of how the underlying algorithms figure out how to distribute space. When starting to use Flexbox and Grid, it can be frustrating to find that we sometimes don’t get the layout we expect. Often this is due to the way sizing is calculated in these new layout methods. In this article, Rachel Andrew will try to explain exactly how big that box is, and how it got to be that size! Read more…