At this point I'm just counting on LLMs to remember all the CSS specification cruft for me.
ileonichwiesz · 1h ago
In my experience LLMs are surprisingly bad at CSS beyond a very basic level. They work fine if you need to change the color of a button, but when it comes to actual styling work, even intermediate stuff like position:absolute or CSS grid, Copilot or even CC default to outputting correct-looking gibberish really quickly.
azangru · 4h ago
I need a tooltip, with a pointer; but it seems that the current state of the spec does not allow for pointers; and most explainers studiously avoid this use case, as if this isn't a lion's share of what people do with anchored floating boxes.
codingdave · 39m ago
Tooltips are normally visible on hover, so the pointer is your cursor. I've never added an additional arrow pointing to the element, nor had any designers ask me to do so. So I'd disagree that such a design is the "lion's share", but am curious what types of apps you create where you do find it to be so?
edoceo · 12m ago
They are using a stylized floating DIV (or something) not the built-in thing from the title attribute. Lots of design teams seem to want this, for consistency.
johtso · 34m ago
Think a common approach is to just display a triangular svg beneath the tooltip:
> Think a common approach is to just display a triangular svg beneath the tooltip
One killer feature of CSS anchor positioning is that it allows you to declaratively define fallback positions if the floating element does not fit into the preferred position. For example, you prefer your tooltips to appear below the anchor; but if the anchor happens to be at the bottom of the screen, there is no space below it, and so the floating element can flip to the top.
After the flip, the triangular svg will be pointing in the wrong direction.
DaiPlusPlus · 4h ago
I'm unsure what you mean by "pointer" - normally that just refers to the user's mouse cursor on-screen...
...do you mean you want a rich-HTML tooltip that is auto-positioned to ensure it's fully visible w.r.t. the browser's viewport but you also want the tooltip (or UI in general) to include an arrow shape that stays fixed on-target even if might be occluded by the browser?
Unless there is a polyfill for Firefox, it will be at least a couple of years before you can rely on this for public sites.
atopal · 3h ago
Anchor positioning is part of Interop 2025. Firefox committed to shipping support for it this year: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025
After that, it should take about 2.5 years for the feature to become Baseline widely available, and depending on your audience[0], you might be able to use it even sooner.
There are already a few sites that don't work properly in Firefox, people started testing only for chrome because its market share is so big.
Really unfortunate because it lets Google get away with anything they want, they are the new standard. But then again, I'm reminded of how Mozilla has pissed away all the users goodwill, and it's not a surprise.
Would be cooler if the whole system were more flexible: you simply define 2 anchor points (one on the target, another on the source, so center bottom would be bottom width 50% and top width 50%) instead of being limited to the 9 predefined areas
jaffathecake · 7h ago
`position-anchor` is a high-level simple way of doing it, and it comes with the restrictions you mention. However, the `anchor()` function, which is also mentioned in the article, gives you the kind of flexibility you want.
`position-area` syntax feels a little tough to remember, but I'm glad top/right/bottom/left is still available.
rtkwe · 13h ago
I was expecting boat anchors haha.
xswhiskey · 12h ago
It being available on WebKit makes me hopeful for general adoption then.
MBCook · 11h ago
I’m surprised it’s not in Firefox. I don’t remember the last time I ran into something in Safari and Chrome but not FF.
I was reading the article and thinking it would be a great thing to adopt for some code we recently wrote, but we have to support Firefox. And since we already have an existing solution that works, no point cleaning it up with this until Firefox adopts it.
Still, looks like a very nice feature.
JimDabell · 5h ago
> I don’t remember the last time I ran into something in Safari and Chrome but not FF.
It’s not especially uncommon. For instance payment requests, web share, and remote playback are all implemented by Blink and WebKit but not Gecko.
I occasionally look into what CSS is being transcoded for the projects I work on, and it’s normally Firefox ESR that needs the most help. If you eliminate that from your browserlists configuration, your source and deployed CSS become a lot more closely aligned. For instance, it was only a year ago that Firefox ESR got CSS nesting.
Do we really need this? Why won't position: absolute and setting top/left/bottom/right suffice?
adamschwartz · 14h ago
It solves many of the pain points Tether[0] tried to solve.
For example it helps when the anchoring element is inside of an oveflow hidden/scroll container, but geometrically you need the tethered element to sit/extend outside of the container (so—for now at least—its DOM node needs to be outside of the container).
Yes. Unless you want to rely on JavaScript libraries like popper and FloatingUI, we definitely need this for many use cases.
The simplest example is if you have content that it not contained by the box you're positioning against. Think tooltips, popovers, etc.
For some usecases like annotating content, this hugely simplifies things.
cyral · 12h ago
This always results in a ton of hacky JS to detect how the element should reposition itself if it overflows the screen (depending on the content and screen size)
Antrikshy · 7h ago
That's fine for a lot of stuff. It becomes tricky to do certain other things. CSS-only tooltips are notoriously limited in scope.
pupppet · 11h ago
This relies on being able to set the position relative to a parent selector, this doesn't work if the element you are positioning is not a descendant of the element you wish to anchor to.
bee_rider · 11h ago
Fundamentally no, html was fine. But hey it’s one fewer reason to reach for JavaScript, right?
RobRivera · 13h ago
Anchor post
danielvaughn · 15h ago
Anchor positioning sounds cool, but I ran into some very unintuitive behavior when I tried to use it. Can’t remember the details, it was a couple years ago.
jaffathecake · 9h ago
I guess you're being downvoted as a general nay-sayer, but you're right. I tried this feature last month and a bunch of browser bugs and design issues got in the way. I reported them, and they're being worked on https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12466
The `margin:0` issue was particularly frustrating & imo should have been covered in the article, as it's a real gotcha when trying to use popover & anchor positioning in combination.
danielvaughn · 1h ago
Yeah I could have mentioned the actual issues I had.
My first attempt was to anchor an element to another one that occurred later in the document order, and it didn’t work. The anchor must be placed before any of its dependents. It kind of makes sense, but doesn’t jump out as intuitive.
bombcar · 15h ago
My problem is always been on sites that have a menu or something similar at the top. The anchor always inevitably goes to the very top of the screen gets covered by whatever menu it is.
chiefalchemist · 13h ago
Isnt there something like scroll-padding or scroll-margin? More or less an offset you can set so that doesn’t happen
https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/Tooltip.html#exa...
One killer feature of CSS anchor positioning is that it allows you to declaratively define fallback positions if the floating element does not fit into the preferred position. For example, you prefer your tooltips to appear below the anchor; but if the anchor happens to be at the bottom of the screen, there is no space below it, and so the floating element can flip to the top.
After the flip, the triangular svg will be pointing in the wrong direction.
...do you mean you want a rich-HTML tooltip that is auto-positioned to ensure it's fully visible w.r.t. the browser's viewport but you also want the tooltip (or UI in general) to include an arrow shape that stays fixed on-target even if might be occluded by the browser?
An arrowhead pointing at the anchor element.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooltip#/media/File:Mobile_URL...
UPD: In spec speak, these are called tethers. The anchoring indicators
https://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/specs/css-anchor-explo...
After that, it should take about 2.5 years for the feature to become Baseline widely available, and depending on your audience[0], you might be able to use it even sooner.
[0]: https://web.dev/blog/whats-my-baseline
Really unfortunate because it lets Google get away with anything they want, they are the new standard. But then again, I'm reminded of how Mozilla has pissed away all the users goodwill, and it's not a surprise.
Doesn't this count? Been there for several years.
https://github.com/oddbird/css-anchor-positioning
[0] https://anchoreum.com/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/anchor
I was reading the article and thinking it would be a great thing to adopt for some code we recently wrote, but we have to support Firefox. And since we already have an existing solution that works, no point cleaning it up with this until Firefox adopts it.
Still, looks like a very nice feature.
It’s not especially uncommon. For instance payment requests, web share, and remote playback are all implemented by Blink and WebKit but not Gecko.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Share_A...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/RemotePlayb...
I occasionally look into what CSS is being transcoded for the projects I work on, and it’s normally Firefox ESR that needs the most help. If you eliminate that from your browserlists configuration, your source and deployed CSS become a lot more closely aligned. For instance, it was only a year ago that Firefox ESR got CSS nesting.
No comments yet
IIRC Firefox lagged quite a lot on Color Profiles and :has
Background data sync/download with continuation
Very true, they started 2 years ago and it has been constantly worked on with the latest update 12 days ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1838746
So, it literally will be "any day now" :-/
For example it helps when the anchoring element is inside of an oveflow hidden/scroll container, but geometrically you need the tethered element to sit/extend outside of the container (so—for now at least—its DOM node needs to be outside of the container).
[0] https://tetherjs.dev
The simplest example is if you have content that it not contained by the box you're positioning against. Think tooltips, popovers, etc.
For some usecases like annotating content, this hugely simplifies things.
The `margin:0` issue was particularly frustrating & imo should have been covered in the article, as it's a real gotcha when trying to use popover & anchor positioning in combination.
My first attempt was to anchor an element to another one that occurred later in the document order, and it didn’t work. The anchor must be placed before any of its dependents. It kind of makes sense, but doesn’t jump out as intuitive.