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My Articles

The <wbr> tag and when you might want to use it

The <wbr> tag is the type of thing that I originally created my articles for in the first place: An obscure HTML/CSS thing that, while it might not come up often, can really come in handy!

In this post, I'll be exploring what <wbr> does, but more important, a few use cases where you might find it being useful.

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CSS transform and transform-origin

transform is a bit of a strange property

All CSS properties have a range of possible values, but transform is a little different than most, in that its values do completely different types of things. They are all related to transforming our selector, but it’s not really the same as color. Sure, color allows us to set pretty much any color we want, but all of them are just setting a color.

With transform we can do the following:

  • rotate - rotates the element
  • scale - scales the element, making it bigger or smaller
  • translate - move the element around, up, down, left and right
  • skew - skews it, which is like pulling or tilting the element
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What is currentColor?

currentColor is a fantastic CSS value and one that not nearly enough people know about.

currentColor is a value that takes on the value of whatever color is currently set to for that selector, whether it's implicitly set or if it's inherited.

This might sound a bit strange, but here is an example where it can be really useful for buttons that have a border that matches the font color

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Scaling buttons with CSS custom properties

Custom properties are everywhere now, and for good reason as there are so many useful — and fun! — applications that you can do with them!

A couple of weeks ago, I had an article published on CSS-Tricks where I looked at the benefits of locally scoping custom properties. In that article I quickly mentioned how it could be really useful to create a button scale.

The article ended up being really long, so I cut out the part about creating a button scale with custom properties. I think it’s a really fun application though, as there are two different ways you could approach it.

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Position fixed vs position sticky

position: fixed has been a staple of CSS for a long time now, and it’s served us well. More recently, we’ve been treated with position: sticky.

Both of them are really similar but there are some important differences. In this post, we’ll be looking at the differences, as well as the use cases for each.

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Creating a website - getting over the anxiety of starting with a blank file

One of my favorite classes to teach at my school is the introduction to HTML & CSS. It’s so much fun seeing people who’ve never even seen a line of code be able to make websites on their own after only a bit of time together.

As much fun as it is once they start to get the hang of it, I also see how daunting it is for them the first time I tell them to make a page from scratch without my help. It also lets me see all the mistakes they make when they start trying to make their very first pages all on their own.

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How to append a unit to a unitless CSS custom property with calc()

I’ve seen complaints that you can’t append a unit to a custom property.

What you can’t do

The complaints seem to come from not being able to do something like this:

.icon {
  --scale: 1;

  /* this doesn't work */
  font-size: var(--scale) + 'px';
}

Granted, that would be awesome if we could do that. But we aren’t writing JavaScript, so we can’t.

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Write more effecient CSS with the `+` combinator

The + combinator is amazing but I always forget that it exists. I recently used it when making a few updates to this site, and thought it would be fun to explore why I love it so much.

How the + combinator works

I feel like the MDN describes it perfectly, saying “The + combinator selects adjacent siblings. This means that the second element directly follows the first, and both share the same parent”.

An example

On my own site, I have the following markup on my articles (such as this one).

<h1>Article title</h1>
<time class="date">March 3 2019</time>
<p>
  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. Accusamus in ullam
  voluptatibus consequatur, vel hic?
</p>
<p>
  Quia, ipsam! Dolores corporis ullam, ut natus consequatur, quaerat
  necessitatibus officiis, incidunt rerum ex ea!
</p>
<p>
  Velit amet blanditiis tempora, incidunt, sint dolor architecto at et
  similique, ex nulla hic fugiat.
</p>

I don’t have classes on any of my paragraphs because I write everything with markup. I could configure things to add something like a .intro to the first paragraph, but there is no need.

I could use something like p:nth-of-type(1) but that would have a lot of potential to break things throughout the rest of a site. In my case, it would affect all my pages, so I’d have to add another selector to ensure I’m on an article.

A great solution is using the + combinator in my CSS selectors:

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