CSS Layout News - Issue 305

The summer seems to have finally arrived here in the UK, which means that British Twitter will briefly switch from complaining about the rain to being cross about it being hot.

Folk seemed to like the look of the new newsletter. I have to give a shout out to Ghost, and their support, as they imported everything for me into their platform. Having done an awful lot of migrating of content over the years, it was a job I really wasn't looking forward to doing. The fact they were able to do that for me made a huge difference.

I don't have a huge amount this week, last weekend was unusual in that a holiday weekend happened in the UK and the USA at the same time, so it's been noticeably quieter! However, there are some interesting things landing in browsers right now to take a look at.

Rachel Andrew, CSS Layout News

News

Firefox 89

The latest version of Firefox includes the ascent-override, descent-override, and line-gap-override @font-face descriptors. These are helpful in matching your fallback font with the loading webfont, to avoid the content re-laying out as it loads in.

The size-adjust descriptor which has shipped behind a preference in Firefox, and is also coming in Chrome 92, will make this even easier.

Safari Technology Preview 125

Lots of interesting CSS bits here, but I did spot the implementation of the two-value syntax for display. That's cool!

Learn

New CSS functional pseudo-class selectors :is() and :where()

An explanation of these new pseudo-class selectors, explaining why and how to use them.

Interesting

25 Years of CSS

Eric Meyer writes about his 25 year journey with CSS. I used many of Eric's resources when I was first learning CSS, as it was just becoming usable in browsers.

Chromium spelling and grammar features

A blog post about implementing spelling and grammar features into Chromium including the highlight pseudo-elements ::spelling-error and ::grammar-error. It's a good look at how tricky implementing a seemingly simple feature can be.