Smashing Magazine’s in-person conferences are back and returning to the wonderful city of Freiburg next month, September 7–10. In you didn’t know it, Freiburg is where it all started for Smashing Magazine! It’s their home turf and the conferences, if you haven’t been to one before, are always worth it.

No secret that Adam’s all about props. Dude gave us Open Props a good while back for a slew of preconfigured variables for color, shadows, sizing, typography, among much much more. Now he’s back with Prop For That, a similar sorta idea, but mind-blowing in the sense that it creates live props based things CSS can’t normally see in the browser. Things like cursor position, progress values, certain form states, current time, scroll velocity — you know, the stuff that JavaScript sniffs and passes to CSS.

Mark Underhill:

And now to the reason I wrote this post: including the word “navigation” in your <nav> labels. There’s no need. If we did, we’d hear something like “Navigation, Primary navigation”. Not the end of the world, but unnecessarily repetitive for screen reader users.

Mat Marquis on Google pulling the web standards equivalent of U2 album marketing:

As a Chrome user, you’ll have received Gemini Nano in the form of a 4GB transfer recently; no permission asked or required. If you remove it, Chrome will re-download it. For reasons I can only guess at, Gemini Nano is presumably now considered to be part of Chrome itself, despite being a standalone product that is included alongside but not integrated into the browser — the way a copy of Bonzi Buddy included in a browser update might be considered a part of said browser.

We all have a few skeletons in our CSS closets. There’s probably that one-off !important where you can now manage that more effectively with cascade layers. Or maybe a dated Checkbox Hack that :has() has solved. Perhaps it’s been a long while since your last site redesign and it’s chock-full of vendor-prefixed properties from 2012. Thar be demons!

Stu Robson’s ReliCSS (clever name!) tool can excavate outdated CSS in your codebase that have modern CSS solutions.

The @custom-media at-rule has landed in Firefox Nightly! I couldn’t find it in the release notes but Adam Argyle’s on the beat noting that it’s behind a flag for now.

I love me some good web research reports. I’m a sucker for them. HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac is one report I look forward to every year, and I know I’m not alone there. It’s one of those highly-anticipated publications on the state of the web, chock-full of well-documented findings about millions of live websites — 17.2 million in this edition! — from page content, to performance, to accessibility, to UX, to… well, let’s just get to it.

If you’re reading this, chances are you already have some sort of way that you’re following when we publish new content, whether that’s RSS, Bluesky, Mastodon, or what have you. But I know a lot of folks like to use DailyDev as well and, if that’s you, we have a couple of ways you can get our stuff there as well. There’s our channel that automatically pulls in new content. There’s also a community page — what DailyDev calls a “squad” — where we curate our content as well as other interesting CSS-y links of interest, called I Heart CSS.

See you there?

I have to search for articles often on this site. And I’d say searching this site is Pretty OK™ in general. Making content searchable on a site with 18+ years of published content is gonna be challenging no matter what, and the Jetpack Search tool we use is darned good considering it’s a drop-in solution.

At the same time, it’s a bit heavy-handed when all I really need is a quick URL I can copy-paste into some other article I’m working on. What would be cool is a search straight from my local machine which is totally possible by fetching the content from the WordPress REST API that runs under the hood of this site.

That’s exactly what Jelte Lagendijk built for Raycast, a “shortcut-all the-things” app for macOS and Windows. It’s a little extension where you simply type and a get a solid set of real-time results.

Andy Clarke with a brand-new resource. It generates the sort of fun typography that Andy commonly uses in his own work that’s geared towards cartoon headings.