How css-tricks improved my work life

My relationship with CSS is some kind of a love-hate one and I think that is a sentiment a lot of web-devs share with me.
My biggest issue with it is, that it is really counterintuitive and most of the time it feels a bit like solving puzzles to make things align the way you want it to.

and oftentimes it feels a lot like

vertical-align: middle;
text-align: center;

And there is also some questionable naming with ‘grey’ (#808080) being darker than ‘darkgrey’ (#a9a9a9)…
In general there are too many quirks you need to just know. Unless you work with it every day, you need to google every second line in order to write your stylesheets.
There you can find all sorts of guidelines, help, blogposts with a nice mix of bad-practices and outdated information.
What helped me a lot is the website css-tricks.

learn everything you need to know about front-end web development with css-tricks

Almanac

One of the most common things I use is the almanac.

I usually consult it when:
– I can’t remember the name of a property
– I forgot the order of values for a property
– I find a weird line in an unfamiliar stylesheet
What I also really appreciate is the amount of additional information you get for each property and the way the information is presented.
You can easily find all of the info you are looking for and a lot of cool and useful stuff that you can also do with it.
Everything is nicely sorted with code examples and demos in which you can also try out your ideas.
In the comments are a lot of FAQ to the specific topic and can be pretty helpful too.

 Guides

The page also has a section called ‘guides’.
Most of the guides are grouped by topic.
Just to name a couple of topics: there are ‘form validation’, ‘how to center elements’, ‘colour guides’ and ‘how to efficiently use flexbox’, just to name a few.
“form validation” for example contains:
– Constraint Validation in HTML
– The Constraint Validation API (JavaScript)
– A Validity State API Polyfill
– …
“typography” contains:
– CSS Basics: Fallback Font Stacks for More Robust Web Typography
– That Fluid Type Stuff Again
– Methods for Controlling Spacing in Web Typography
… and many more.

Videos

For all the users that prefer learning with some audio-visual input there is also a video section with useful tutorials and good-to-knows 🙂

Conclusion

CSS-tricks really helped me a lot with finding my way into web-development and I still use it for its excellent explanations.
I would recommend it to everyone who wants to or has to work with front-end web development, because it makes life so much easier 🙂

Feu Mourek

Developer Advocate

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Feu verbrachte seine Kindheit im schönen Steigerwald, bevor es sich aufmachte die Welt zu Erkunden. Seit September 2016 unterstützt es Icinga zunächst als Developer und seit 2020 als Developer Advocate, und NETWAYS als Git und GitLab Trainer. Seine Freizeit verbringt es hauptsächlich damit Video-, und Pen and Paper Rollenspiele zu spielen, sich Häuser zu designen (die es sich nie leisten können wird) oder ganz lässig mit seinem Cabrio durch die Gegend zu düsen.

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