Surma.link – New ways to make your web app jank with Houdini – An introduction

This is a really good primer on all the pieces that make up the Houdini approach to CSS—giving authors access to low-level APIs for rendering.

As is often repeated here, it’s still early days and caution is advised, but it’s still a good idea to wrap your head around what’s coming down the standards pipe.

There’s even more specs in Houdini’s list of drafts, but the future of those is rather uncertain and they are not much more than a placeholder for an idea at this point. Examples include custom overflow behaviors, CSS syntax extension API, extension of native scroll behavior and similar ambitious things that allow you to screw up your web app even worse than ever before. Rejoice!

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Related links

Better typography with text-wrap pretty | WebKit

Everything you ever wanted to know about text-wrap: pretty in CSS.

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Building WebSites With LLMS - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).

I really like this approach: using separate pages instead of in-page interactions. I remember Simon talking about how great this works, and that was a few years back, before we had view transitions.

I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work.

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Why I Like Designing in the Browser – Cloud Four

This describes how I like to work too.

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Justified Text: Better Than Expected? – Cloud Four

Some interesting experiments in web typography here.

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Knowing CSS is mastery to Frontend Development — Anselm Hannemann

Anselm isn’t talking about becoming a CSS wizard, but simply having an understanding of what CSS can do. I have had similar experiences to this:

In the past years I had various situations where TypeScript developers (they called themselves) approached me and asked whether I could help them out with CSS. I expected to solve a complex problem but for me — knowing CSS very well — it was always a simple, straightforward solution or code snippet.

Let’s face it, “full stack” usually means “JavaScript”—HTML and CSS aren’t considered worthy of consideration. Their loss.

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