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

Howdy—Robin Rendle here.

This blog keeps me in the loop with everything that’s possible with CSS lately but it’s also a reminder to celebrate the people doing the hard work building stuff for the web.

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:

Tagged with drew powers

Three Layers of UI Interaction

Drew Powers wrote about how to polish UI and described this process as the 3 layers of UI interaction:

  1. Render area: where does this element appear?
  2. Hit area: what is the shape/size/placement of the invisible interactive area?
  3. Focus area: when Tab-ing, what is the focus ring shape/placement?

What happens when you don’t care for these things? Well, I reckon everything about a UI then feels uncertain and we tend to navigate around with a real lack of confidence. But there’s been many times where I’ve forgotten about that third one!