Hello Reader,

As part of my Asked 100 Devs game that I’m doing, I asked developers which CSS property they have to look up the syntax for most often.

The video is in the section below, but one thing that I didn’t think of when putting the question together was that people often look a lot of things up 😅.

I probably could have phrased the question better, asking about what they look up the most often, but I think it raised an important point, that even people who know what they are doing and do this all the time still look things up.

I’m constantly opening up MDN to get the syntax for different properties, or even watching my own videos to remind myself how I did something.

Whenever we watch videos or hear others talking about code, it always seems so effortless, so always remember that if you don’t remember how something works, or if a set of values need commas or not, or the order for something like box-shadow, you’re in the norm 🙂.

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week 📺 This CSS property fixes a problem as old as CSS ​ Every element with text in it is slightly taller than the text you can see. There’s empty space above and below all the characters, with that space coming from the font. text-box-trim and text-box-edge let you cut that space away, so the box actually ends where the letters do. And if you think you’ll never remember the keywords for it, Temani Afif has created a tool for you. ⚡ What CSS syntax do devs have to always look up? | Front-end Family Feud ​ I asked 100 devs which bit of CSS syntax they always have to look up, then made Michael Warren guess the top answers. Some of them you’ll see coming. At least one you won’t.

Have a fantastic week!
Kevin

P.S. If reading about text-box-trim made you realize you've been guessing at why CSS does what it does, that's the whole reason CSS Demystified exists.

It doesn't teach you syntax, it helps you build mental models around how it works, so the next weird spacing problem is something you can reason about instead of trying to guess (or prompt) your way to fixing the issue (while also making sure you know about the features that can help solve these problems!).

​Find out more about it here.

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