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Hi! I'm Kevin

CSS Patterns, nesting gotchas, and AI is a dead end?

Published 3 months ago • 4 min read

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Hello Reader,

The pattern of shorter newsletters continues for me, as I continue my prep for CSS Day.

I’m writing this on Thursday morning (my normal newsletter writing time), and yesterday, as I was rehearsing my talk, I realized I had a pretty big oversight in my talk, so I spent the rest of the day reshuffling things and updating the demos I’m using.

It all means it’ll be a stronger talk, but I’ll be on the plane to the Netherlands as you get this email in Amsterdam, since I forgot to schedule sending it, so I’d have much rathered this not have happened close to when I leave 😅.

I also wanted to mention that if you are in or around Amsterdam but can’t attend CSS Day itself, there is the completely free Web You Want Conf happening on June 10th. There are still tickets available, and CSS Cafe is also putting on a free popup event on June 13th.

I don’t think I’ll be at the Web You Want since I’m travelling with my wife this time around, and there’s only so many web events I can drag her to, but I will be at the CSS Cafe event.

If you are going to be at CSS Day or the CSS Cafe event, please do make sure to stop me and say hi, and if you like stickers, I’ll have some that I’m giving away as well 😊.

📺 Three CSS patterns I use in every project

video preview​

A quick look at three of my favorite patterns, the .stack, .pile, and .prose.

I’ve talked about these before, but I tried to share a few ways that I use them, and some different use cases for the .pile than might seem obvious at first.

⚡ Two NSS nesting gotchas

video preview​

Native CSS nesting is awesome, but there are a few side effects you need to watch out for.

🎙️AI Coding is a dead end

video preview​

I realize the title of this one is a bit click-baity, but my video from two weeks ago was a bit of a downer, and I wanted something more upbeat, so in this one, I talk about how, even as AI becomes more promninate, actually having skills is still important, and the only way to have them is by coding some things yourself still.

🔗 Other awesome stuff from around the web

📝 Quiz time!

You want an element to transition from height: 0 to its natural height when opened. Which single line can make height: auto animatable?

  1. interpolate-size: allow-keywords
  2. transition-behavior: allow-discrete
  3. transition-size: auto
  4. will-change: height

As per usual, you'll have to head on over to YouTube to take a stab at the quiz, and once you answer, you'll see if you were right or not.

​

🏁

Very good chance there’s no newsletter next week, so until I am back in your inbox, cheers!

Kevin

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Hi! I'm Kevin

Helping people fall in love with CSS

Weekly newsletter, where I talk about tangentially-related front-end development topics and share what I've been up to in the last week, plus any cool/fun/interesting/useful links I come across as well.

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