Dynamic CSS with Vue
Inspired by VueConf 2018 I spent some time learning JS and Vue in more depth, and built myself a more flexible VueFinder presentation tool to fit my needs. This year, I returned to VueConf and gave the closing talk on passing data between CSS and Vue.
After learning about Vue from Sarah Drasner’s stream of articles on CSS-Tricks, I had the pleasure of speaking at VueConf 2018. I really enjoyed that conference, and left feeling inspired by the community and the framework behind it. I loved that I could build complete and valid Vue components in plain HTML/CSS – and slowly integrate JS logic as necessary. I started digging, and quickly learned to bind JS data to HTML attributes:
<table :style="{'--scale': graph.scale}">
<!-- ... -->
<td :style="{'--value': item.value}">{ item.value }%</td>CSS variables provide a safe approach for passing JS settings to CSS via inline HTML. While most inline styles are difficult to override, CSS variables can instead be ignored – making their inline specificity harmless.
I wrote a quick demo for CSS-Tricks – More CSS Charts, with Grid &
Custom Properties – and continued to develop the idea into my latest
talk: Dynamic CSS. This talk explores how data can be used to
manipulate presentation directly in CSS – a combination of variables,
calc(), grids, hsl() and more.
The slides are online, and you can sign up for a notification when the videos are posted.
While learning JS and Vue in more detail, I decided to re-build my presentation software to better meet my needs as a speaker.
The result, which I call VueFinder, allows me to write slides using a slightly-extended markdown syntax – with yaml metadata for each slide. That metadata controls slide layout, allows me to embed Vue components directly for live demos, and pass in CSS variables for custom styling.
VueFinder is public and open-source, though it isn’t currently as reusable as I would like. The content and logic are tightly coupled in ways I haven’t yet resolved. If you’re interested in helping make this a more viable open source tool, or using it yourself, I’m open to new features and PRs.
After VueConf, Rahul Kadyan released an extension for Visual
Studio Code that provides syntax-highlighting and code-folding for my
.slides files, as well as the .vue-slides format he uses. Thanks,
Rahul!
This year I connected with the Vue Vixens, and enjoyed getting to know more of the Vue community. Chris Fritz and Rahul helped me add some last-minute features to my slide deck, while Maria Lamardo and Krystal Campioni both inspired new demos in my talk.
Animated sprites from Monster Slayer by Krystal Campioni [permalink / source] – hover to see them move
You can find all the available speaker slides linked from gist.
Are we responding to the right inputs?
For many years, it has been ‘best practice’ to use relative units (especially em and rem) for sizing text. That’s great! But after playing around with my user preferences, I think we can improve on the common approaches.
How to find an anchor element
It is frustrating to track down why an anchor isn’t being found. I’ve found a simple way that should work in most cases. If that doesn’t work, step through the checklist, and then dive in to get a better understanding of how Anchor Positioning works.
New layouts will be possible
The more I play with it, the more convinced I am that anchor positioning is going to unlock some surprising new layouts.