Some more CSS comics

I’ve been continuing to write pages about CSS! Here are 6 more.

Two of them are about how to think about CSS in general (“CSS isn’t easy” and “backwards compatibility”), which is something I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

handling browser bugs is normal?

The fact that finding workarounds for browser bugs is kind of a normal part of writing CSS really surprised me – there’s this great repo called flexbugs which catalogs bugs in browser implementations of flexbox. A lot of the bugs are in IE which means (depending on your goals) that you can just ignore them, but not all! A bunch of the flexbugs are in Chrome or Safari or Firefox.

For example, I ran into flexbug #9 a few days ago, which is that in Safari a <summary> element can’t be a flexbox, so instead you need to put an extra div inside the <summary> to be the flex element.

In the past I would have reacted to this in a more grumpy way (WHY? NOOOOO? WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?! CSS?!?!?!). But this time I noticed that my site looked weird in Safari on my iPad, figured out after 30 minutes or so that it was a Safari bug, implemented a workaround, and it actually wasn’t that big of a deal!

I think this mindset of “oh, there’s a browser bug, oh well, I guess that happens sometimes!” is a lot healthier and more likely to result in success than getting mad about it.

there are a lot of ways CSS can go wrong

I think there are at least 3 different ways your CSS can be buggy:

that element doesn’t have the styles applied that it should (for example it’s supposed to be background; blue but it’s background: red instead)
the element has the “right” styles applied, but those styles do something confusing / unexpected to me because of something I misunderstood about the CSS spec
the element has the “right” styles applied and those styles do the right thing according to the spec, but the browser has a bug and isn’t implementing the spec correctly

Anyway, enough CSS musings, here are the comics :)

handling browser bugs is normal?

there are a lot of ways CSS can go wrong

css isn’t easy

backwards compatibility

CSS specificity

centering in CSS

padding syntax

flexbox basics