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.

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Tagged with inset-area

An intro to CSS anchor positioning

I’ve been half-ignoring anchor positioning but patiently waiting for it to land in browsers for a while now. But this explanation by Brecht yesterday reminded me to buckle up and learn it all properly since it just landed in the latest version of Chrome and Edge.

One thing I hadn’t heard of before Brecht’s post was the inset-area property which sure is handy. As he explains, it lets you draw a grid around an element and then position something left/right/up/down within it:

.anchored {
  position-anchor: --anchortome;
  position: absolute;
  inset-area: top span-all;
}

This feels like how I’d anchor-position something like a tooltip maybe 95% of the time which is neat. But! Although anchor positioning sure is going to be amazing for tooltips, it goes far beyond that. Re-reading Roman Komarov’s post from last year made me spit-take again:

It becomes possible to highlight something in a completely different place on the page, allowing elements to “know of each other”.

Not only does that sound punk rock and strangely ominious, I think that’s what anchor positioning really opens up.