An ongoing firehose of the latest 10 things we’re reading from around the web that we find interesting. Subscribe to the feed.
July 1, 2025
CSS conditionals with the new if() function
Learn about the new CSS if function, which enables a cleaner developer interface for dynamic styles like style queries and media queries.
June 25, 2025
Quantity Query Carousel
The concept of a quantity query is really neat. Coined by Heydon back in 2015, the idea is that you apply different styles depending on how many siblings there are. They was a way to do it back then, but it’s gotten much easier thanks to :has(), which not only…
June 23, 2025
CSS Color Functions, Glow Effects, and Hypnotic Loaders
This week’s CodePen community highlights include a comprehensive rundown on CSS color functions from Sunkanmi Fafowora for CSS-Tricks, a sweet neon glow effect from Pavel Boytchev, and loading animations that will put you in a trance from Jon Kantner and MrPirrera. Plus, ghaste shares a gallery of corner-shape designs, and…
June 25, 2025
Quality is a trap
Like cicadas emerging from the ground, design industry conversations about quality seem to periodically erupt on social media. Also like cicadas, these articles are as predicable as they are irritating. I can’t count the amount of Medium thinkpieces I’ve seen come and go where an author accidentally stumbles backwards into…
June 20, 2025
Font size dimensions
First, we used pixels to describe the size of things on the web. Most digital tools and technologies communicated in pixels so this seemed like a logical decision to use. Over time, we’ve received other units in CSS that were relative to some other amount. Percentages were based on the…
June 20, 2025
Roundrect Dictator
I have many thoughts about the redesigned elements common across most of Apple’s platforms but they are still brewing, much as I hope the same is true for the visual interface itself. There is one thing, though, which is a downright shame: Apple’s guidance for the shape of Mac app…
June 17, 2025
Scope in CSS
This is a written adaptation of my talk at CSS Day 2025. It was a lovely event, but I realize life is complicated and not everyone can make it to events like this. There are videos up paywalled at conffab.com. I figure this written version can make my points as…
June 16, 2025
Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs
All web developers know, at some level, that accessibility is important. But when push comes to shove, it can be hard to prioritize it above a bazillion other concerns when you’re trying to center a <div> and you’re on a tight deadline. A lot of accessibility advocates lead with the…
June 13, 2025
Having figure match width of contained image
On Monday, I was working on a layout where the client wanted an image centered in the page. I also had another use case where the image would be floated to let the other content beneath flow around the image. The image also had a caption. I knew that I…
June 13, 2025
Safari at WWDC '25: The Ghost of Christmas Past
At Apple’s annual developer marketing conference, the Safari team announced a sizeable set of features that will be available in a few months. Substantially all of them are already shipped in leading-edge browsers. Here’s the list, prefixed by the year that these features shipped to stable in Chromium: 2023: WebGPU…