Workaround

Two weeks ago, I wrote:

I woke up today to a very annoying new bug in Firefox. The browser shits the bed in an unpredictable fashion when rounding up single pixel line widths in SVG. That’s quite a problem on The Session where all the sheet music is rendered in SVG. Those thin lines in sheet music are kind of important.

Paul Rosen, who makes abcjs, the JavaScript library that renders sheet music on The Session, managed to get a fix out pretty quickly. But I use an older version of the library and updating it would introduce some side-effects that would take me a while to work around. So that option wasn’t available to me.

In this situation, when the problem is caused by a browser bug, the correct course of action is to file a bug with the browser. That had already been done. Now all I could do was twiddle my thumbs and wait for the next release of the browser, which would hopefully ship with the fix.

But I figured I may as well try to find a temporary workaround in the meantime.

At first, I looked at diving into the internals of the JavaScript—that’s where the instructions are given for drawing the SVGs.

But then I stopped and thought, “If the problem is with the rendering of the SVG, maybe CSS can help.”

I started messing around with SVG-specific CSS properties like stroke, fill, and so on. With dev tools open, I started targeting the paths that acted as bar lines in the sheet music, playing around with widths, opacities, and fills.

It was the debugging equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall. Remarkably, it actually worked.

I found a solution with this nonsensical bit of CSS:

stroke: currentColor;
stroke-opacity: 0;

For some reason, rather than making all the barlines disappear, this ensured they were visible.

It’s the worst kind of hacky fix—the kind where you have no idea why it works, but it does.

So I shipped it.

And at pretty much exactly the same time, a new version of Firefox dropped …with the bug fixed.

I can’t deny that there was a certain satisfaction in being able to work around a browser bug. But there’s much more satisfaction in deleting the hacky workaround when it’s no longer needed.

abc to SVG | CSS-Tricks

Aw, this is so nice! Chris points to the way that The Session generates sheet music from abc text:

The SVG conversion is made possible entirely in JavaScript by an open source library. That’s the progressive enhancement part. Store and ship the basic format, and let the browser enhance the experience, if it can (it can).

Here’s another way of thinking of it: I was contacted by a blind user of The Session who hadn’t come across abc notation before. Once they realised how it worked, they said it was like having alt text for sheet music! 🤯

An in-depth guide to customising lists with CSS - Piccalilli

Think you know about styling lists with CSS? Think again!

This is just a taste of the kind of in-depth knowledge that Rich will be beaming directly into our brains at Web Day Out…

Reduce the JS Workload with no- or lo-JS options

This is an excellent one-stop shop of interface patterns:

This is an organic collection of common JS patterns that can be replaced with just HTML, CSS, and no, or very low, JS. As HTML and CSS continue to mature, this collection should expand.

What’s new in web typography? | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

There have been so many advances in HTML, CSS and browser support over the past few years. These are enabling phenomenal creativity and refinement in web typography, and I’ve got a mere 28 minutes to tell you all about it.

I’ve been talking to Rich about his Web Day Out talk, and let me tell you, you don’t want to miss it!

It’s gonna be a wild ride! Join me at Web Day Out in Brighton on 12 March 2026. Use JOIN_RICH to get 10% off and you’ll also get a free online ticket for State of the Browser.

CSS in 2026: The new features reshaping frontend development - LogRocket Blog

Jemima runs through just some of the exciting new additions to CSS:

Replacing 150+ lines of JavaScript with just a few CSS features is genuinely wild. We’re able to achieve the same amount of complexity that we’ve always had, but now it’s a lot less work to do so.

And Jemima will be opening the show at Web Day Out in Brighton on the 12th of March if you want to hear more of this!