Articles Videos Talks Experiments

Brecht De Ruyte

Frontend Developer

Brecht De Ruyte

utilitybend.com

Articles by Brecht De Ruyte

Going beyond constants with custom properties

If you love CSS, you’ve probably heard of custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables) before. Still, a lot of people seem to use them as constants for their CSS. In this article, I will try to give you some more insights on how you can use these custom properties to create some smart systems or even use them as booleans in CSS and create easy progressive enhancements.

Published on: June 26, 2023

Why you should be using new CSS features today - part 2

In the previous part of this article, I tried to tickle your brain a bit to unleash your curiosity and drive your determination to try some new CSS features today. That's exactly what I'll be doing in this part, writing some new stuff today so you can slowly polish new CSS skills very sneaky and hidden in the code, like a ninja.

Published on: December 5, 2022

Why you should be using new CSS features today - part 1

Unless you have no affinity with CSS at all or have been living under a rock for the last year, you should have noticed that new CSS features are skyrocketing like never before. Although this is a good thing, it might get frustrating to get a grasp on all these new playthings because every time you add something new in your styling toolbox, the next best thing is just around the corner.

Published on: November 30, 2022

Practical uses of the :has() relational pseudo class

The :has() relational pseudo class has landed in Chrome and Safari and even though it gets less hype than for instance container queries, I believe this little pseudo class contains a lot of improvements to the way we write CSS today.

Published on: October 27, 2022

CSS Day 2022: A small recap

After a long break because of Covid-19, CSS Day is back. In a new location at the Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam. Once again trying to create the perfect line-up for everything design and CSS, and boy, they delivered just that.

Published on: July 8, 2022

frontend css conference

Using best practices to create CSS scroll snapping tabs

How should scroll snapping tabs behave when using keys? By reading some best practices, I believe I found an elegant solution.

Published on: March 31, 2022

frontend css a11y

Talks by Brecht De Ruyte

I can has() timeline UI?

In this fast-paced presentation packed with demos, We will be taking a bit of a deeper dive into the has() relational pseudo class, moving on to animating things based on scroll with animation-timeline and finally ending with a short introduction on Open-ui and the anchoring API.
Read more
frontend
CSS
HTML
Slides
slide-deck
The future of UI is "open"

When dealing with more advanced UI elements there are a lot of things that go wrong. They impact performance, accessibility and have the tendency to create frustrations along the way. In this talk, I will be introducing you to the W3C community around Open UI, while also taking a little detour with the Anchoring API. By combining these future specs we'll take a peek at the future of styling custom UI by only using HTML and CSS, giving you less frustration, performance boosts and basic accessibility out of the box.
Read more
frontend
CSS
HTML
a11y
accessibility