5 CSS tips you didn't know you needed

Having worked in web development agencies over the years, I've picked up some tips and tricks along the way. There are some things that I use day to day, that I barely even think about. Some of them are fairly standard, and others are a bit more unusual, but all of the snippets and examples below are things that I've used on client websites.

Transitions

By default on all of the websites I build, I always add a CSS transition on the links and buttons for their hover state. It just adds a nice effect on hover, and takes away from that harsh/abrupt change when you interact with a button or link.

// Background colour transition
transition: background 0.2s ease-in-out;

For a button I'd most likely add the transition for the background colour as shown above, for a link I'd set the transition property to all (transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out) which could allow me to transition the hover colour and border for example.

I also never use text-decoration: underline. You don't have much control using that, whereas you can use a bottom border to get a much nicer effect. Padding allows for better spacing, and you can even transition or animate the border if you'd like.

.link {
    transition: border 0.2s ease-in-out;
    border-bottom: 1px solid transparent;
}

.link:hover {
    border-color: blue;
}

Background overlay

Say you have some text, positioned absolutely on top of an image. But the background image is too bright, making the text unreadable. You could add another div in there somewhere to create a dark overlay behind the text, however this is not great and adds an extra empty div that is not really necessary.

Pseudo-elements to the rescue!

Using the :before element means we can also apply it if a certain class is added to the div for instance. Below is an example of how I would achieve this overlay background:

The key part in the above code is setting your overlay colour, and opacity level. This can be any colour, I've just used black and white as an example:

//Black overlay - 0.5 opacity
background: rgba(0,0,0,0.5);

//White overlay - 0.2 opacity
background: rgba(255,255,255,0.2);

Multi-line underline effect

The pen below is something that may or may not be useful to people, but it is something I was asked to do on a client website. It allows the ability to have a bold underline effect which will span across a sentence to the length of that sentence, even if it's wrapped over multiple lines.

Even if this doesn't apply to your design, or requirements. It can also be used for things such as a link hover effect like the one shown below:

Sticky elements

Need an element to stick on scroll, but don't want to use JavaScript, or a plugin, or the height of your content is dynamic and likely to change? position: sticky is your friend.

position: -webkit-sticky;
position: sticky;
top: 0px;

This was incredibly handy for me when I had to have a sidebar stick next to an accordion element. Because of the accordion opening and closing, I would have had to calculate the height or use some other complicated method, when position: sticky just worked straight away. The only thing I've found to look out for is that it doesn't work when the body element is set to overflow: hidden, and is not supported in IE11 (it just doesn't stick, and Edge is fine).

Prevent highlighting

Being able to select text on a website is fairly standard and expected, however I've found occasionally that the user can click multiple times on an element (for example a carousel arrow) and it selects/highlights the element.

To prevent this, you can use the following snippet:

.noselect {
  -webkit-touch-callout: none; /* iOS Safari */
    -webkit-user-select: none; /* Safari */
       -moz-user-select: none; /* Firefox */
        -ms-user-select: none; /* Internet Explorer/Edge */
            user-select: none; /* Non-prefixed version, currently
                                  supported by Chrome and Opera */
}

If you got this far, thanks for reading! I hope this comes in handy for some people and I hope to do some further posts with some more day to day snippets if that is of interest to anyone.

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