Tagged “deepdive”

I’m partial to going down the rabbit-hole on a niche aspect of front-end development. For example a few years ago I got the urge to dig into what’s going on with containers and items in Flexbox-powered layouts and noted my findings in Flexbox-fu. I do it to go beyond the thing’s theory and into its practical application for solving real web development challenges; to gain a deeper understanding of why things behave the way they do. These deep dives take time but are rewarding; usually I’ll learn about more than I expected.

Recently I dug into the characteristics and behaviour of the CSS outline property. The catalyst was seeing Heydon Pickering’s clever use of outline to automate divider lines within a flexbox powered navigation menu. I couldn’t fathom how it works so decided to reverse-engineer it. More on Heydon’s trick later, but I’ll start with a recap of what outline is good for.