trick posts

CSS: checking support for selectors

April 2nd, 2018 at 23:05

in WWW browser css selector support trick

@supports is a good way to apply an entire block of styles only if (modern) browsers support a particular property-value combo. There is no similar block-level mechanism for selector support. Selectors are automatically ignored if their values or syntax aren’t recognized by the browser, so they basically already do this at the ruleset level.

Except, sometimes you want to apply styles to other elements that don’t use the selector, but only if the browser supports the selector.

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SASS: Storing `&` in variable

May 1st, 2017 at 23:00

in WWW sass selector trick

Apparently in SASS you can store the current selector in a variable, eg a{ $a: &; }. Useful for dealing with some limitations of & without having to repeat selectors.

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Duplicate selectors: Increase specificity without being more specific

May 10th, 2016 at 02:08

in WWW css specificity technique trick

CSS has a concept of specificity wherein more “specific” selectors take precedence over less specific. Sometimes specificity rules cause a set of property values to be applied while another is desired. This can result in the developer increasing specificity on the desired set to outweigh the other set. When I’ve needed extra specificity, I’ve often use an ‘html’ class on the <html> element or a ‘body’ class on the <body> element. The downsides of are it:

is more specific, as in precise, meaning the selector won’t match in a document without those helper classes.
has a performance penalty for needing to check a(nother) parent element of the target element.
only allows one more unit of specificity at the class level for each parent used.

Today (yesterday), I found a better way that can add any amount of class level specificity (weight) without being more specific (precise), thanks to CSS Wizardry. I’ve been doing this CSS thing for a while, but I hadn’t realized .foo.foo would match <div class="foo">. In essence, you can duplicate a selector and chain it onto itself to create an equivalent selector, but with double the specificity. You can duplicate it as many times as needed to get the desired specificity, e.g. .foo.foo.foo.foo to override .foo.foo.foo, without requiring any parent selectors. Besides the benefits already mentioned, it could be seen as more explicit in its purpose than using parent elements, because there is no other reason to do it. I will have to start using this.