Tags: boxes

Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features | CSS-Tricks

It’s now easier than ever to style form controls without sacrificing semantics and accessibility:

The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the <input> tag itself. This means we can keep and style an <input> and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra <div> or <span>, to pull off a custom design.

The demo is really nice. And best of all, you can wrap all of these CSS enhancements in a feaure query:

Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to @supports.

Infovore » Pouring one out for the Boxmakers

This is a rather beautiful piece of writing by Tom (especially the William Gibson bit at the end). This got me right in the feels:

Web 2.0 really, truly, is over. The public APIs, feeds to be consumed in a platform of your choice, services that had value beyond their own walls, mashups that merged content and services into new things… have all been replaced with heavyweight websites to ensure a consistent, single experience, no out-of-context content, and maximising the views of advertising. That’s it: back to single-serving websites for single-serving use cases.

A shame. A thing I had always loved about the internet was its juxtapositions, the way it supported so many use-cases all at once. At its heart, a fundamental one: it was a medium which you could both read and write to. From that flow others: it’s not only work and play that coexisted on it, but the real and the fictional; the useful and the useless; the human and the machine.

Nobody Said CSS Is Easy

One thing I gained a stronger awareness of (simply from working with checkboxes) is that it’s important to progressively enhance UI components, so that a fancy custom one is able to fall back to the default browser styles and functionality. This way, a user can still access the UI if JavaScript or CSS fail.

Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Generating Wireframe Boxes with CSS and HTML5

Eric uses some super-clever CSS to “wireframe up” a web page.

I wonder if this could be turned into a little bookmarklet?

Affirming User Choice With Checkboxes, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

Well, this is timely! Just today I was having a really good natter with Charlotte about using checkboxes, specifically sending multiple values to the server:

You’ll notice that the name given to each of these checkbox input elements is the same: “reservation-requested-device[]”. The square brackets (“[]”) at the end of the name are the magic bit that allows the values of each chosen “reservation-requested-device” checkbox to be submitted as the value of “reservation-requested-device”.

See, I wasn’t sure whether that was just a PHP thing (the only server-side input-handling I’ve had much experience of) or whether it was a more general way of sending multiple values.

Update: It seems that the square brackets are indeed a PHP thing. Multiple values will be sent in any case. See this test case.

Brian Suda breaking boxes at dConstruct 2007 on Vimeo

Continuing the tradition started at the Highland Fling. I love the way that Ribot wanders into shot like C3P0. Ribot robot.

Custom checkboxes

A truly excellent piece of DOM scripting by Steve Chipman that replaces checkboxes with images.