Articles in "HTML"

How do you handle the look and feel of a component when an element moves between contexts? In the past we relied on modifier classes or passing down framework props. But combining container style queries with the new advanced attr() capabilities gives us interesting ways to handle our CSS architecture: HTML attributes feeding directly into typed CSS variables, and components adapting themselves purely through CSS.

For a long time, if you wanted to style the space between items in a grid or flex layout, you had to fake it. Borders on child elements, extra pseudo-elements, background tricks, extra markup, etc. It worked... until it didn't. Responsive changes could break illusions, it always felt hacky, and in a few cases we'd end up polluting the DOM structure for something purely visual (Which I hate doing). An update that is long overdue, CSS is filling those gaps in our grid systems.

About half a year ago I wrote about the idea to have multi-handle range sliders as a native HTML element. I asked for feedback, and the community delivered. The proposal has moved forward since then, but it needs more voices to get browser vendors on board. Here's what happened, what changed, and what you can do. This article shows some of the survey results, and is a big call for help.

I talk about progressive enhancement a lot. Like, a lot. So when it came time to redesign my own site, I figured it was time to actually practice what I preach. What started as a typography fix turned into a full redesign powered by view transitions, corner-shape, @property, scroll-state queries, anchor positioning, and more. All progressively enhanced. All without a single polyfill.

Oh, how I have been waiting to write this title! If you've read a few things by me, you know I'm always a bit hyped when CSS gives us the keys to the state-machine kingdom. For years, we've relied on intersection observers or scroll events in JavaScript to answer simple questions about an element's position and state. We already have a lot of these things happening in browsers, such as scroll-driven animations. But more state information is on the rise with an update on scroll-state queries.

A few weeks ago, I didn't think I'd start the year with another demo on customizable select. To be honest, I was hoping to let it go for a little while. But there is an update on the rise that needs to be talked about: The multiple select. This little attribute could change a lot of things in making multiple selections; it could turn a series of checkboxes into one element, and it could improve accessibility. This is still in development, but we can take a peek in Chrome Canary.

We need to talk about multi-handle range sliders… Really, we do. They’re one of those UI elements we see on a variety of web shops indicating price ranges; we see them for selecting time-slots; we see them for filtering between a variety of lenght units. Creating these experiences is more often inaccessible than just working, and even when I found the so-called perfect library, I’d still run into limitations for styling and expanding upon it. I thought that I should do something about this. I might be way over my head, and that is why I need your help...

A little while ago, in Chrome 133, a feature called popover=”hint” landed in the browser. This feature paved the way to something bigger, more specifically, popovers being triggered on hover/focus. This comes with a new attribute “interestfor” and some CSS properties to change the delay speed when showing popovers using that method. There still isn’t much definitive on how this should behave on devices without hover capabilities, and that’s what this article is all about. I want to make sure the content of these popovers is accessible on touch devices.

In this part of my customizable select series, I want to highlight option groups! Option groups are part of our select interactions to provide clarity, and now, they can be styled. This will certainly not be the last demo I did on the select, and more updates are coming to this element. With a wink to the past, we will be creating a restaurant dish picker, a true “Select Menu”.

In this (long) part of the customizable select series, it’s all about gamification. In this article, I’d like to highlight one of my demos, where I aimed to recreate a piece of UI found in the Monster Hunter games. To re-create this behavior, I had to think in terms of keyboard navigation first. This demo requires quite a lot of CSS, as well as some scripting, and in the end, I do want to highlight some accessibility concerns. This is an experiment on how far we can take it when styling select elements.

In this third episode of my exploration of the customizable select, I thought it was time to show how we can have a little bit of fun with an old friend: sticky positioning. In this article, we’ll be following up on earlier techniques while exploring how we can use the :checked pseudo-class to create a fun open and close effect. We’ll be messing with top-layer functionality, interpolate-size and other trickery to create an emoji picker.

In this second part of my customizable select series, I’d like to highlight one feature from Interop 2025 that works beautifully with this feature: anchor positioning. This article contains one of my first demos ever created when styling the select and has evolved with every new syntax and iteration across the months / years. We'll also be taking a glimpse at a few experimental features, but the basis of this can be used today. Let’s take a look at my potion selector with CSS.

The customizable select has entered Chrome 134, allowing us to style this form element to our hearts' content. I decided to write a series about this feature because there are so many cool things we can do with CSS these days to create some really unique and fun experiences. In this first article of the series, I want to talk a bit about the history, while also giving an in-depth guide on how you can start creating your first customizable select as a progressive enhancement, today.

The year was 2018, and we were still trying to cope with IE11 and had to find some ways for certain effects. Things that we take for granted with CSS nowadays were not possible and one of the solutions to create awesome effects on the web was using SVG Filters. Fast forward to 2025, SVG filters are still awesome, but I use them less. In this article, I wanted to revisit them, with some easy-to-use effects we can use today.

Every year, I create a little demo right before the holidays as a CSS greeting card. This year is no different. To celebrate the end of the year and all those new amazing features that came into CSS, I decided to let myself go a little with new CSS techniques. A sort of recap of things I learned and put them in one little CodePen. This time, I’m combining scroll-driven animations, anchoring, and @property in CSS.

One thing I’ve learned over the last year is to deal with changes in explainers and specs and that naming things is hard. In this update on Invokers, I will cover the new syntax and the new name: Invoker Commands. Once again giving you some control over interaction with HTML from opening dialog elements to creating custom counter buttons and video controls.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could click on a button to open a modal with just HTML? How about those file input elements? Imagine that creating a custom play button for video controls would be an easy thing to do. How about custom counter buttons for a number input? This is where the idea of invokers comes in. It’s currently available behind a flag to play around with and it’s definitely one of the most exciting advances in HTML to look out for.

While learning about web components a few months ago, I wanted to create my first (useless) little component as a package on NPM. In this article a little tutorial on how I created my first basic web component with LIT, Typescript, using an easy setup with Vite. I will be sharing how to do the setup, some of the ideas behind it, and some of the gotchas.

The year 2024 might be a big one for web components and I for one am excited about this. Truth be told - a few months ago - I barely knew anything about them as I thought they were just this niche thing floating around on the web. But a lot of buzz is being created. So I wanted to learn more about them. I can now proudly say I published my first (useless) web component on npm - a Valentines special - for-love element.

Have you run into a situation where you need the padding of one element to align with the padding of another element? It’s a common debacle, especially when a page layout is set with global padding? In this article I demonstrate that issue with a full-width slider component that breaks out of the main page container using a couple of techniques to keep it visually aligned with other elements on the page.