The Cascade is a blog about the past, present, and future of CSS.

Howdy—Robin Rendle here.

We’re living through a golden age: CSS was once a language that was easy to make fun of but has now transformed into a serious and expressive toolkit for building visual interfaces. Although making fun of CSS was always lame, today, in 2024, it shows a deep lack of curiosity. The train has left the station. CSS rules. Get with the program.

But this didn’t happen randomly. Thousands of dedicated, smart folks have worked tirelessly over decades to get us to this point where CSS is—in this humble blogger’s opinion—the best design tool ever made. Every day some new super power is unlocked for us in browsers and with each new power the web becomes a better place, thanks to them.

So this blog exists to keep me in the loop and somewhat up to date with everything that’s possible with CSS but also it’s a reminder to celebrate the people doing the hard work building these tools for us.

You can subscribe to The Cascade via RSS, shoot me an email if you absolutely must, or follow the feed. This project is directly supported by readers and the membership program.

Right now the newsletter is taking a bit of a break whilst I figure out a healthy publishing cadence, but you can subscribe below:

Detect JavaScript Support

Ryan Mulligan on the new-to-me scripting CSS media feature:

With this feature, we can provide alternative CSS rules depending on whether or not JavaScript is available in the user's browser. It can also help reduce flashes of unstyled content or undesirable layout shifts.

This is super neat, so you can now write a media query and ask the browser if JavaScript is on:

@media (scripting: enabled) {
	.my-element {
		/* enhanced styles if JS is available */
	}
}

...or disabled:

@media (scripting: none) {
	.my-element {
		/* fallback styles when JS is not supported */
	}
}

Ryan has a great demo of when you want to do that, how to combine queries together for some powerful styling possibilities, and some issues that might pop up when browser extensions are installed.