Essential CSS Recipes

Gradient Borders

Nowadays you may use gradients even in borders. It is rather easy to use, just want to set pseudo-elements with lower z-index:

All illustration  you can find here. Also, there is approach with background-clip andbackground-origin. Finally, in the bright future border-image estate will be supported by all browsers and solution for this will look as follow:

Object Fit

Do you remember this moment when you needed to set background-size for image because it will solve a lot of problems? Now you may use object-fit which is supported by WebKit and will be combined to Firefox soon.

Counters in CSS

Not everyone know that counteracts can be made with CSS:

and radio button:

Blend Modes

Not so far Firefox and Safari began to support blend modes legal as Photoshop does. It also works in Chrome and Opera but with flags. See an example:

Transition for z-index

You may don't see but z-index supports transitions too! It doesn't development it's value on each step so you take that it doesn't have a development. But it does!

CurrentColor

We can use it to disclose the current color so we don't have to construct it lots of times. It can be good when working with SVG icons which change their color depend on their parents. Usually, we do it as follows:

but let's do it with:currentColor

Another code with pseudo elements:

Advanced CSS Counters

You can also count the identical checkboxes which were selected by user:

You can also build a small calculator:

New Dimensions

Not so far this world exposed some new ways to portray sizes of different objects. Here are them:

• vw (viewport width) - one percent of the browser window's width.
• vh (viewport height) - the like  but for height.
• vmin and vmax choose minimally and maximal value between vh and vw.

The attractive thing is that they all are hugely supported by most of the modern browsers so you can freely use them. Why do we want them? That's because they make all large simpler. You don't have to specify a percentage of parent's element size and any other stuff. Just have a look:

Or you can put a beautiful popup at the center of the screen:

Also, there are some negative facts about using this feature:

• IE9 should be told to use vm instead of vmin.
• iOS7 may have some bugs with.vh
• vmax is not fully supported yet.

See more:

Learn animation using CSS3, Javascript, and HTML5

Optimizing CSS for Internet Explorer