Styling the Navigation: Declarative Route and Navigation Matching in CSS

One of the things that we at Chrome have been thinking about for a while now is a way to do declarative route and navigation matching in CSS. Together with Noam Rosenthal and David Baron I’ve been working on it for the past few months.

After an initial introduction at the CSS Working Group back in January, and a quick feedback session at CSS Day in June, we think we have something that is ready for further discussion.

At next week’s CSS Working Group F2F (face-to-face) meeting in Berlin, we’ll be presenting our current line of thinking. This post is a quick intro to the concepts we’ll be covering.

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View Transitions: Use the new attr() or match-element for the view-transition-name?

At CSS Day, “YouTube guy” Kevin Powell showed a lot of demos that relied on the advanced attr() function. In one of the examples he used attr() to set view-transition-name values — a technique I covered in my article on advanced attr() function.

But then during the Q&A, Cyd Stumpel wondered if he couldn’t just use match-element there.

The short answer to that question is yes. The longer answer is … It Depends™

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Introducing view-transitions-toolkit, a collection of utility functions to more easily work with View Transitions.

In my work with View Transitions over the last several years, I’ve published everything from deep-dive articles, demos, and announcement videos at Google I/O. I’ve also done some more experimental things with it, such as optimizing the keyframes or driving a View Transition by scroll.

To turn the lessons from these scattered experiments into something more reusable for both you and me, I’ve bundled the most frequent code patterns into a dedicated package: view-transitions-toolkit.

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CSS position: sticky now sticks to the nearest scroller on a per axis basis!

If you’ve ever tried to build a data table with a sticky header and a sticky first column, you know the pain. You’d think a simple position: sticky with top: 0 and left: 0 would be enough, but the reality was that only one of both would stick.

A recent change to CSS fixes this: position: sticky now plays nice with single-axis scrollers, allowing you to have sticky elements that track different scroll containers on different axes. This change is available for testing in Chrome 148 with the experimental web platform features flag flipped.

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