In my quest to push forward what is possible with custom properties in CSS, I discovered another application of cyclic dependencies. Combined with a prior technique based on custom cascade layers, we are now even closer to something that resembles native CSS mixins.
This was another productive year for me. After 2023, I was afraid that I couldn’t get anywhere close. After all, innovation is hard, and you never know if you will stumble over something exciting. Looking back at 2024, I can safely say that I managed to continue doing what I was doing. And, as it will be obvious from the post, there were things that would be difficult to top.
Today, Chrome published two “intents to ship”: for the new CSS `if()` function, and for custom CSS functions. I informally object to this.
For me, 2025 was a much less productive year than 2024. A mix of industry and world frustrations, personal issues, and just certain people being mean — all of that made me live on borrowed spoons for most of the year. This post won’t have any of that, of course, but will contain a roundup of everything I wrote about CSS, so if you missed something — it is a good way to catch up!
When working on another blog post, I noticed that my blog’s styles were broken in Chrome Canary. What happened? A change in how “short-circuiting” of custom property fallbacks works.
Two days ago, I published a new article. In that article, I presented a way to prototype native CSS mixins with what we have in CSS today. Three days ago, Lu Wilson published an experimental colour format: Splash. When I read about it, I immediately saw what I’d want to do with it: prototype a mixin.
I have a big backlog of photos, and now that I have an ability to embed them in my blog, I will occasionally do so! I am initially posting them on Pixelfed, and this post was originally published there. Pixelfed is cool, maybe you should join it, and post photos there, and not _somewhere else_. If you’re publishing them on your site — reposting them on Pixelfed could also be a good idea.
Personal site, blog and experiments with CSS and other front-end technologies.