Tag: Styling

Styling Based on Scroll Position

Posted on March 7, 2019 in Design

Rik Schennink documents a system for being able to write CSS selectors that style a page when it has scrolled to a certain point. If you’re like me, you’re already on the lookout for document.addEventListener('scroll' ... and being terrified about performance. Rik gets to that right away by both debouncing the function as well as marking the event as passive.

The end result is a data-scroll attribute on the <html> element that can be used in the CSS. Meaning if you’re scrolled to 640px down the page, you have <html data-scroll="640"> and could write a selector like:

html:not([data-scroll='0']) {   body {     padding-top: 3em;   }   header {     position: fixed;   } }

See the Pen
Writing Dumb JS 🧟‍♂️ and Smart CSS 👩‍🔬 by Rik Schennink (@rikschennink)
on CodePen.

Unfortunately, we don’t have greater than (>) less than (<) selectors in CSS for things like numbered attributes, so the CSS styling potential is fairly limited here. You might ultimately need to update the JavaScript function such that it applies other classes or data attributes based on your math. But you’ll already be set up for good performance here.

“Apply styles when the user has scrolled away from the top” is a legit use case. It makes me think of a once function (like we have in jQuery) where any scroll event would only be triggered once and then not again. They scrolled! So, by definition, they aren’t at the top anymore! But that doesn’t deal with when they scroll back to the top.

I find it generally more useful to use IntersectionObserver for styling things based on scroll position. With it, you can do things like, “has this element been scrolled into view or beyond,” which is generically useful and can be used for scrolled-away-from-top stuff too.

Here’s an example that adds or removes a class if a user has scrolled past a hidden pixel positioned at 500px down the page.

See the Pen
Fixed Header with IntersectionObserver by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)
on CodePen.

That’s performant as well, avoiding any scroll event handlers at all.

And speaking of IntersectionObserver, check out “Trust is Good, Observation is Better—Intersection Observer v2”.

The post Styling Based on Scroll Position appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Styling a Web Component

Posted on January 8, 2019 in Design

This confused me for a bit here so I’m writing it out while it’s fresh in mind. Just because you’re using a web component doesn’t mean the styles of it are entirely isolated. You might have content within a web component that is styled normally along with the rest of your website. Like this:

See the Pen yGaNKr by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

That <whats-up> element isolated the JavaScript-powered functionality of itself by attaching a click handler to the <button> inside of it. But the styling of that button comes from global CSS applied to that page.

But let’s say we move that <button> into the web component, so we can use <whats-up> all by itself. We could do that by .innerHTML‘ing the web component (I suppose because it’s really a “custom element”):

See the Pen Web Component with Global Styles (because no Shadow DOM) by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Again, entirely styled by the global CSS. Cool. That may be desirable. It also might not be desirable. Perhaps you’re looking to web components to isolate styles for you. Web components can do that via the Shadow DOM. Here’s that same component, using Shadow DOM instead:

See the Pen Web Component with Local Styles by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Note that the functionality still works (although we had to querySelector<code> through the <code>shadowRoot), but we’ve totally lost the global styling. The Shadow DOM boundry (shadow root) prevents styling coming in or going out (sorta like an iframe).

Shadow Root

There is no global way to penetrate that boundary that I’m aware of, so if you want to bring styles in, you gotta bring them into the template.

See the Pen Web Component with Local Styles by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

This would be highly obnoxious if you both really wanted to use the Shadow DOM but also wanted your global styles. It’s funny that there is a Shadow DOM “mode” for open and closed for allowing or disallowing JavaScript in and out, but not CSS.

If that’s you, you’ll probably need to @import whatever global stylesheets you can to bring in those global styles and hope they are cached and the browser is smart about it in such a way that it isn’t a big performance hit.

I’ll use CodePen’s direct link to CSS feature to import the styles from the Pen itself into the web component:

See the Pen Web Component with Local Styles by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Another important thing to know is that CSS custom properties penetrate the Shadow DOM! That’s right, they do. You can select the web component in the CSS and set them there:

See the Pen Web Component with Custom Properties by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

The post Styling a Web Component appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Styling a Select Like It’s 2019

Posted on December 31, 2018 in Design
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The Current State of Styling Scrollbars

Posted on November 23, 2018 in Design

If you need to style your scrollbars right now, one option is to use a collection of ::webkit prefixed CSS properties.

See the Pen CSS-Tricks Almanac: Scrollbars by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Sadly, that doesn’t help out much for Firefox or Edge, or the ecosystem of browsers around those.

But if that’s good enough for what you need, you can get rather classy with it:

See the Pen Custom Scrollbar styling by Devstreak (@devstreak) on CodePen.

There are loads of them on CodePen to browse. It’s a nice thing to abstract with a Sass @mixin as well.

There is good news on this front! The standards bodies that be have moved toward a standardizing methods to style scrollbars, starting with the gutter (or width) of them. The main property will be scrollbar-gutter and Geoff has written it up here. Hopefully Autoprefixer will help us as the spec is finalized and browsers start to implement it so we can start writing the standardized version and get any prefixed versions from that.

But what if we need cross-browser support?

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Simplify Styling with Functional CSS

Posted on November 7, 2018 in Design

There is no doubt that “functional CSS” resonates strongly with some people. If that term is new to you, I belive it’s come to mean the same thing as “Atomic CSS” as defined by John Polacek here. Harry Nicholls likens it to a function that can only produce one result (although I’d call that a pure function or pure component), but instead of a return value being entirely predictable based on inputs, it is an application of style that only does one thing.

I’m of two minds here. People say how fast they can work this way. Great! They like how predictable the applied styles are. Great! I can understand how a tiny stylesheet that doesn’t grow over time is appealing as well.

At the same time, I haven’t seen writing about other styling concerns. What happens with big redesigns? Is it about the same, time- and difficulty-wise, or do you spend more time tearing down all those classes? What happens when you need a style that isn’t available? Write your own? Or does that ruin the spirit of all this and put you in dangerous territory? How intense can all the class names get? I can think of areas I’ve styled that have three or more media queries that dramatically re-style an element. Putting all that information in HTML seems like it could get awfully messy. Is consistency harder or easier? I get that “p5” might be a useful way to apply an abstract amount of padding, but you still need to sprinkle it all over your codebase and know when to use it, right?

The closest I’ve been to being convinced about it was hearing from Adam just how configurable Tailwind is. In any case, I find this all endless fascinating and, if you love it, more power to ya.

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