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CodePen Blog
Chris’ Corner: Fairly Fresh CSS

I joked while talking with Adam Argyle on ShopTalk the other day that there is more CSS in one of the demos we were looking at that I have in my whole CSS brain. We were looking at his Carousel Gallery which is one of the more impressive sets of CSS demos I’ve ever seen. Don’t let your mind get too stuck on that word “carousel”. I think it’s smart to use that word here, but the CSS technologies being developed here have an incredible number of uses. Things that relate to scrolling interactivity, inertness, column layout, and more. Some of it is brand spanking new. In fact just a few weeks ago, I linked up the Carousel Configurator and said:

It only works in Google Chrome Canary because of experimental features.

Which was kind of true at the time, but the features aren’t that experimental anymore. All the features went live in Chrome 135 which is in stable release now for the world. Of course, you’ll need to think in terms of progressive enhancement if you’re looking to roll this stuff out to production, but this is real world movement on some huge stuff for CSS. This stuff is in the category where, looking a few years out, it’s a real mistake if carousels and carousel-like behavior isn’t built this way. This is the way of best performance, best semantics, and best accessibility, which ain’t gonna get beat with your MooTools Super Slider ok. Brecht is already bloggin’ about it. That’s a finger on the pulse right there.

What else is pretty hot ‘n’ fresh in CSS land?

* CSS multicol block direction wrapping by Rachel Andrew — The first implementation of of columns being able to wrap down instead of across. Useful.
* Can you un-mix a mixin? by Miriam Suzanne — Mixins are likely to express themselves as @apply in CSS eventually (despite being abandoned on purpose once?). We can already sort of do it with custom properties and style queries, which actually have the desirable characteristic of cascading. What will @apply do to address that?
* Feature detect CSS @starting-style support by Bramus Van Damme — Someday, @supports at-rule(@starting-style) {} will work, but there (🫥) is no browser support for that yet. There is a way to do it with the space toggle trick fortunately (which is one of the most mind bending things ever in CSS if you ask me). I feel like mentioning that I was confused how to test a CSS function recently, but actually since they return values, it’s not that weird. I needed to do @supports (color: light-dark(white, black) {} which worked fine. Related to @starting-style, this is a pretty good article.
* New Values and Functions in CSS by Alvaro Montoro — speaking of new functions, there are a good number of them, like calc-size(), first-valid(), sibling-index(), random-item(), and more. Amazing.
* A keyframe combo trick by Adam Argyle — Two animations on a single element, one for the page load and one for a scroll animation. They fight. Or do they?
* Container Queries Unleashed by Josh Comeau — If you haven’t boned up on the now-available-everyone @container stuff, it rules, and Josh does a great job of explaining why.
* A Future of Themes with CSS Inline if() Conditions by Christopher Kirk-Nielsen — Looks like if() in CSS behaves like a switch in other languages and what you’re doing is checking if the value of a custom property is equal to a certain value, then returning whatever value you want. Powerful! Chris is building something like light-dark() here except with more than two themes and where the themes effect more than just color.

Created with veo in aistudio Google

🌐 Weird Internet Facts You Probably Never Heard Of! 🤯

Hey there, curious minds! 👋

Think you know the internet? Think again. Here are some wild facts that might just blow your mind:

The Internet Has Weight?!
Physicists estimate that the electrons powering global internet activity weigh about 50 grams—roughly the weight of a strawberry. Tiny but mighty!

First Webcam = Coffee Cam
In 1991, University of Cambridge staff invented the first webcam... just to check if the coffee pot was full. True dedication to caffeine!

Bots Rule the Web
Over 60% of internet traffic comes from bots, not humans. That includes crawlers, scrapers, and sometimes... malware.

"Internet Surfing" Was Coined by a Librarian
In 1992, Jean Armour Polly, a librarian, came up with the term. She compared browsing the web to catching waves in the ocean.

Oldest .com Ever?
The first-ever .com domain registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. It’s still live—go check it out!
The internet is full of surprises.

Which fact blew your mind the most? Drop a comment!

#InternetFacts #TechTrivia #FunFacts #DidYouKnow #WebHistory #CodingLife #StrangeButTrue

CodePen Blog
Chris’ Corner: Rounded Triangle Boxes and Our Shapely Future

I enjoyed Trys Mudford’s explanation of making rounded triangular boxes. It was a very real-world client need, and I do tend to prefer reading about technical solutions to real problems over theoretical ones. This one was tricky because this particular shape doesn’t have a terribly obvious way to draw it on the web. https://blog.codepen.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/motorway-cvt-1024x412.jpg CSS’ clip-path is useful, but the final rounding was done with an unintuitive feGaussianBlur SVG filter. You could draw it all in SVG, but I think the % values you get to use with clip-path are a more natural fit to web content than pure SVG is. SVG just wasn’t born in a responsive web design world.

The thing is: SVG has a viewBox which is a fixed coordinate system on which you draw things. The final SVG can be scaled and squished and stuff, but it’s all happening on this fixed grid.

I remember when trying to learn the <pathsyntax in SVG how it’s almost an entire language unto itself, with lots of different letters issues commands to a virtual pen. For example:

* M 100,100 means “Pick up the pen and move it to the exact coordinates 100,100”
* m 100,100 means “Move the Pen 100 down and 100 right from wherever you currently are.”

That syntax for the d attribute (also expressed with the path() function) can be applied in CSS, but I always thought that was very weird. The numbers are “unitless” in SVG, and that makes sense because the numbers apply to that invisible fixed grid put in place by the viewBox. But there is no viewBox in regular web layout., so those unitless numbers are translated to px, and px also isn’t particularly responsive web design friendly.

This was my mind’s context when I saw the Safari 18.4 new features. One of them being a new shape() function:

For complex graphical effects like clipping an image or video to a shape, authors often fall back on CSS masking so that they can ensure that the mask adapts to the size and aspect ratio of the content being masked. Using the clip-path property was problematic, because the only way to specify a complex shape was with the path() function, which takes an SVG-style path, and the values in these paths don’t have units; they are just treated as CSS pixels. It was impossible to specify a path that was responsive to the element being clipped.

Yes! I’m glad they get it. I felt like I was going crazy when I would talk about this issue and get met with blank stares.

Tyrs got so close with clip-path: polygon() alone on those rounded arrow shapes. The % values work nicely for random amounts of content inside (e.g. the “nose” should be at 50% of the height) and if the shape of the arrow needed to be maintained px values could be mix-and-matched in there.

But the rounding was missing. There is no rounding with polygon().

Or so I thought? I was on the draft spec anyway looking at shape(), which we’ll circle back to, but it does define the same round keyword and provide geometric diagrams with expectations on how it’s implemented.
An optional <lengthafter a round keyword defines rounding for each vertex of the polygon.
There are no code examples, but I think it would look something like this: /* might work one day? */
clip-path: polygon(0% 0% round 0%, 75% 0% round 10px, 100% 50% round 10px, 75% 100% round 10px, 0% 100% round 0%);
I’d say “draft specs are just… draft specs”, but stable Safari is shipping with stuff in this draft spec so I don’t know how all that works. I did test this syntax across the b[...]

rowsers and nothing supports it. If it did, Trys’ work would have been quite a bit easier. Although the examples in that post where a border follows the curved paths… that’s still hard. Maybe we need clip-path-border?

There is precedent for rounding in “basic shape” functions already. The inset() function has a round keyword which produces a rounded rectangle (think a simple border-radius). See this example, which actually does work.

But anyway: that new shape() function. It looks like it is trying to replicate (the entire?) power of <pathbut do it with a more CSS friendly/native syntax. I’ll post the current syntax from the spec to help paint the picture it’s a whole new language (🫥): <shape-command= <move-command| <line-command| close | <horizontal-line-command| <vertical-line-command| <curve-command| <smooth-command| <arc-command<move-command= move <command-end-point<line-command= line <command-end-point<horizontal-line-command= hline
[ to [ <length-percentage| left | center | right | x-start | x-end ]
| by <length-percentage] <vertical-line-command= vline
[ to [ <length-percentage| top | center | bottom | y-start | y-end ]
| by <length-percentage] <curve-command= curve
[ [ to <positionwith <control-point[ / <control-point]? ]
| [ by <coordinate-pairwith <relative-control-point[ / <relative-control-point]? ] ] <smooth-command= smooth
[ [ to <position[ with <control-point]? ]
| [ by <coordinate-pair[ with <relative-control-point]? ] ] <arc-command= arc <command-end-point[ [ of <length-percentage{1,2} ]
&& <arc-sweep? && <arc-size? && [rotate <angle]? ] <command-end-point= [ to <position| by <coordinate-pair] <control-point= [ <position| <relative-control-point] <relative-control-point= <coordinate-pair[ from [ start | end | origin ] ]? <coordinate-pair= <length-percentage{2} <arc-sweep= cw | ccw <arc-size= large | small
So instead of somewhat obtuse single-letter commands in the path syntax, these have more understandable names. Here’s an example again from the spec that draws a speech bubble shape: .bubble {
clip-path:
shape(
from 5px 0,
hline to calc(100% - 5px),
curve to right 5px with right top,
vline to calc(100% - 8px),
curve to calc(100% - 5px) calc(100% - 3px) with right calc(100% - 3px),
hline to 70%,
line by -2px 3px,
line by -2px -3px,
hline to 5px,
curve to left calc(100% - 8px) with left calc(100% - 3px),
vline to 5px,
curve to 5px top with left top
);
}
You can see the rounded corners being drawn there with literal curve commands. I think it’s neat. So again Trys’ shapes could be drawn with this once it has more proper browser support. I love how with this syntax we can mix and match units, we could abstract them out with custom properties, we could animate them, they accept readable position keywords like “right”, we can use calc(), and all this really nice native CSS stuff that path() wasn’t able to give us. This is born in a responsive web design world.

Very nice win, web platform.

8 Fun Facts About AI You Didn't Know!
AI can dream – Google’s DeepDream turns normal photos into trippy dreamscapes!

It beat a Go world champion – AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in 2016, a historic moment in AI.

It creates art & music – AI can draw, paint, compose, and even sing!

It writes code – Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot help programmers (or do it all).

It finds new medicine – AI helped discover Halicin, a powerful antibiotic.

Voice cloning? Yes! – AI can mimic your voice from just a few seconds of audio.

It trains by gaming – AI learns strategy by playing games like Dota 2 or Minecraft.

It doesn't really “understand” – AI predicts patterns; it doesn’t think like humans.
Which one surprised you the most?

#AI #InterestingFacts #TechNews #FunFacts #ArtificialIntelligence

Smartphones and Microphones: Who Might Be Listening to You?

(*A must-know reality!)

Today, many people are concerned that their smartphones might be secretly recording their conversations.
This is not just a rumor — it’s technically possible, and in some cases, it is actually happening.
The Reality:

Special spyware can activate your microphone without your permission.

Some telecom companies and device manufacturers may allow hidden access to microphones and cameras, sometimes cooperating with government agencies.

Advanced "zero-click" exploits can take over your device without you clicking anything.

Officially:

Under normal conditions, apps must request your permission to access the microphone.

However, through sophisticated attacks, malicious apps, or system-level backdoors, recording without permission is possible.

How to Protect Yourself:

Always keep your device updated.

Avoid installing suspicious apps.

Regularly monitor which apps have microphone and camera access.

Use trusted security apps to detect spyware.

Iossible, physically block the microphone and camera.

Essential HTML Guide

(Short, Clear, Powerful!)

Must-Know Tags:

<h1> to <h6> — Headings
<p> — Paragraph
<a href=""> — Link
<img src="" alt=""> — Image
<ul>, <ol>, <li> — Lists
<div> — Block container
<span> — Inline container
<form> — User input form
<input>, <button>, <textarea>, <select>, <option> — Form elements

Key Attributes:
href — URL for links
src — Image source path
alt — Image description (important for SEO)
class — CSS styling
id — Unique element ID
placeholder — Text hint in form fields

SEO & Accessibility Basics:
Use <title> and <meta name="description"> inside <head>.
Always write alt attributes for images.
Follow correct heading order (<h1> → <h2> → <h3>, etc.)

Quick Best Practices:
Write clean, indented code.
Use semantic tags (<header>, <main>, <footer>) instead of just <div>.
Validate your HTML at validator.w3.org.

HTML is the skeleton of every website. Master it, and you master the web!