Hello Reader,

Looking back over the last 12-months or so, I’ve done so many things that I literally never dreamed that I’d have the opportunity to do.

Namely, I’m thinking of:

• talking at CSS Day
• talking at Smashing Conf New York
• and having a course on Frontend Masters.

And, while it’s incredible—and still a little unbelievable—to look back at those things, it also now, even after they’ve all happened successfully, they all still cause me to feel some pretty major imposter syndrome.

I was going to talk a lot about that as the introduction to this newsletter, but I wanted it to be as public as possible (because talking about these things is important), and because it became a little too long for the intro section here, so I put it up as a blog post on my site instead.

The tl;dr of it is:

• I still find it hard to identify as an expert within the CSS field, even if all evidence points to otherwise.
• I’m super grateful that I’ve had these opportunities.
• A huge “Thank You!” to you and everyone who follows me, watches and shares my content, enrolls in my content, and otherwise makes all of this possible!

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week

Pure CSS Scroll Spy Table of Contents - No JavaScript Required!

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When I was poking around on the CSS Wrapped 2024 website, I noticed the scroll spy they had on the table of contents.

I had a sneaking suspicion that it was made without any JavaScript, and after diving into the dev tools I was pretty much convinced.

I was having trouble recreating it though, and I knew I was going to be talking with Adam Argyle about a few other things, and decided to bring it up during our discussion.

And I was right, it was CSS-only!

This video is him explaining how it works, and then helping me fix my demo.

(Also, sorry for the captions baked into this one… I had generated some for a social media post, and then thought I removed them all before exporting, but I only removed Adam’s, and not mine 🤦)

Shorts of the week

• ​CSS lessons for your parking fails - not often that I venture into satire, but this was fun to make 😊
• ​Floats still have a purpose - A quick look at a good use-case for floats

🎙️ Podcast Navigating CSS Layout Decisions Inspired by recent articles from Andy Bell and Alex Riviere (linked in the links section below), I explore a bit of my own decision-making process when deciding between Flexbox and Grid. This leads to me talking about intrinsic and content-first layouts as well, and how the most important thing is that we're thinking about the decisions that we're making. LISTEN ON: APPLE | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | WEB​

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🔗 Other awesome stuff around from the web

• ​A simple masonry-like composable layout​
• ​Dark Patterns Detective​
• ​Don’t Use aria-label on Static Text Elements​
• ​Is 2025 the Year of the ‘Design Engineer’?​
• ​Move elements around the DOM while preserving their state with moveBefore​
• ​CSS image stack cycle (CodePen)

📅 Mark your calendars

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On Friday, the 24th, I’ll be doing my first live stream of the year.

For the stream, I’m going to be making a dark mode for HTML & CSS Tip of the Week.

You’ll be able to watch on both YouTube and Twitch at 12pm EST / 9am UTC / 5pm UTC. If you follow the YT link, you'll see it in your local timezone and can set a reminder.

I’ll be creating the dark theme and setting it up with prefers-color-scheme.

If I have enough time, I’ll also build in a toggle to manually switch between the different themes as well.

If I run out of time, I'll do that in a future live stream 😊.

I should be a lot of fun, and I hope you’re able to join me live, but the replay will be available afterwards if you miss it.

🏁

Have a fantastic week!
Kevin

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