"The challenge: building a button with an expanding border on hover. Simple, right? You might be unpleasantly surprised."

Andy Clarke lifts the lid on Custom Properties, and adds a little spice with an elegant method for providing fallbacks for those with older browsers. Remember, at Christmas we all need to look out for our elders, be they friends, family or even just browsers.

There are a few concepts in CSS layout that can really enhance your CSS game once you understand them. This article is about the Block Formatting Context (BFC). You may never have heard of this term, but if you have ever made a layout with CSS, you probably know what it is. Understanding what a BFC is, why it works, and how to create one is useful and can help you to understand how layout works in CSS.

So how do you get something valuable out of 200 bytes and how do we show the user something before the image is fully loaded?

Stuart Robson tackles the thorny issue of integrating modern CSS Grid layouts into an existing design system, but in doing so reaps the benefits of leaner, more easily maintainable markup. It goes to show that with careful planning, there’s no reason old and new CSS layout methods cannot meet under the mistletoe.