Day 80: container style queries

posted on January 13., 2023

It’s time to get me up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

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Container style queries allow querying the computed values of a query container.

No browser supports it yet, but we should be able to do something like this:

.card {
  aspect-ratio: 1 / 1;
}

.card--wide {
  aspect-ratio: 16 / 9
}

@container style(aspect-ratio: 16 / 9) {
  img {
    object-fit: cover;
  }
}

We can check whether a container has a specific property and value assigned and apply additional styles based on this condition. Chrome support container style queries behind a flag, but only with custom properties, not ordinary properties.

Here’s an example based on a component I've built a while ago where this can be useful. We have a card component that can be used in different ways. It can contain just text, text and an image, text and a video, and also text with a background color. Most background colors in our design system work well with black as the text color, but there’s one exception.

:root {
  --nebelgrau: #d6d1ca;
  --flieder: #aaaafa;
  --abendstimmung: #49274b;
}

.card {
  --bg: var(--nebelgrau);
  background-color: var(--bg);
}

<div class="card">
  <h2>Chapter 1</h2>
</div>

<div class="card" style="--bg: var(--flieder)">
  <h2>Chapter 2</h2>
</div>

<div class="card" style="--bg: var(--abendstimmung)">
  <h2>Chapter 3</h2>
</div>

I could assign a class to this specific card variation and just change the text color. That’s actually what we’re doing at the moment, but with style queries I can create a general rule that changes the text color whenever the container has a specific background color.

@container style(--bg: var(--abendstimmung)) {
  * {
    color: #fff;
  }
}

See on CodePen.

Further reading

• CSS Style Queries

Want more?

1. Previous post: Day 79: font-tech() and font-format()

Overview: 100 Days Of More Or Less Modern CSS

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