A rather geeky/technical weblog, est. 2001, by Bramus
Adding a Dark Mode toggle to your website is a nice touch that many users appreciate. When implementing one, the default instinct for many developers is to reach for a simple binary switch: Light on one side, Dark on the other.
While a two-state control might seem like the most straightforward solution, I firmly believe it’s flawed from a user experience perspective. Instead, we should all be using tri-state controls. Let me explain why.
scroll-axis-lock: none
When you scroll a 2D scroller on a website, the browser does a lot of work behind the scenes to keep you on track. One of the things it typically does is scroll axis-locking (aka “railing”), ignoring some minor scroll deltas in the non-main scrolling axis. While helpful most of the times, this sometimes can get in the way such as in map or image zoom interfaces. With the new CSS scroll-axis-lock property you can disable the browser’s default scroll axis-locking behavior, allowing users to immediately perform a diagonal scroll.
TIL: MDN exposes up-to-date page view data through https://popularities.mdn.mozilla.net/current.csv. Using Google AI Studio, I generated a visualizer to explore the data.
One of the things that we at Chrome have been thinking about for a while now is a way to do declarative route and navigation matching in CSS. Together with Noam Rosenthal and David Baron I’ve been working on it for the past few months.
After an initial introduction at the CSS Working Group back in January, and a quick feedback session at CSS Day in June, we think we have something that is ready for further discussion.
At next week’s CSS Working Group F2F (face-to-face) meeting in Berlin, we’ll be presenting our current line of thinking. This post is a quick intro to the concepts we’ll be covering.
Mid May, at this year’s Google I/O, Una and I gave a talk “What’s new in Web UI” live at Shoreline in the Chrome tent.
In May I spoke at the 10th (and final 😔) edition All Day Hey! in Leeds, UK. I opened the conference with a talk on View Transitions.
Back in April I went to Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf. I initially planned on going as an attendee, but when organizer Marc asked me to speak I couldn’t say no …
While we’ve accepted that websites don’t need to look the same everywhere, we seem to be stuck on a new hurdle: the idea that websites need to function the same everywhere.
attr() or match-element for the view-transition-name?
At CSS Day, “YouTube guy” Kevin Powell showed a lot of demos that relied on the advanced attr() function. In one of the examples he used attr() to set view-transition-name values — a technique I covered in my article on advanced attr() function.
But then during the Q&A, Cyd Stumpel wondered if he couldn’t just use match-element there.
The short answer to that question is yes. The longer answer is … It Depends™
view-transitions-toolkit, a collection of utility functions to more easily work with View Transitions.
In my work with View Transitions over the last several years, I’ve published everything from deep-dive articles, demos, and announcement videos at Google I/O. I’ve also done some more experimental things with it, such as optimizing the keyframes or driving a View Transition by scroll.
To turn the lessons from these scattered experiments into something more reusable for both you and me, I’ve bundled the most frequent code patterns into a dedicated package: view-transitions-toolkit.