A very long list
of everything on this siteā¦
'All' content
Container queries & units have a lot to offer
as we enter a more content-out era of Intrinsic Web Design,
but they also come with some limitations of their own.
Join Miriam to learn about how the feature works,
how to start using it in production,
and what to look forward to as Container Queries continue to evolve.
I just added a few upcoming events ā
three tech conferences,
and a comedy debateā¦
Earlier this year,
all the major browsers released Cascade Layers,
with the potential to fundamentally change
how we write styles ā
especially in an age of design systems,
component libraries,
and third-party tools.
But fundamental changes
require us to re-think
how all the pieces fit together.
I want to re-think the front-end of my site,
without too much change to
the (Eleventy/Markdown) content that drives it.
And I want to do it slowly.
Thereās a well-established ābest practiceā
that CSS authors
(as well as linters and minifiers)
should remove units from any 0
value.
Itās a fine rule in most cases,
but there are a few common situations
where it will break your code.
Erin and I spent a couple days last week
at the Colorado Shoe School
in Bellvue, CO ā
learning, designing, and making our own sneakers.
Yes,
actual sneakers,
fit for wearing,
and built from scratch.
Only the soles come pre-formed
out of recycled plastic.
All browsers add an 8px
margin
on the body
element ā
itās part of the w3c-recommended
default stylesheet
which browsers generally use
as a starting point
for their own āuser agentā styles.
But why 8px
?
Where does that come from?
Working on Sass
support for color spaces,
I ran into a question
about the proper handling of hwb()
colors.
That lead me down a rabbit hole,
exploring the edges of hwb
(and powerless color channels) in CSS.
Thereās a new web API proposal
for transitioning shared-elements across pages.
Itās great for making smooth page transitions,
but what if we apply it to individual elements
with changing styles on a single page?
This post has been written
and published,
and filed away for safe keeping
as an event that happened in my past.
This post is also a live performance,
and an invitation to engage.
Thanks for dropping by.
In CSS,
there are compound selectors
and also complex selectors,
and I never remember which is which.
Do you need to learn the difference?
Probably not.
But Iām tired of looking it up.
I was Interviewed by Rachel Andrew
for the web.dev Designcember
(and finally got around to posting a link here)
Declarative controls for presentational state
The other day, I posted an article about
implementing webmentions
on this site.
Today, Iām battling an endless stream
of spam in my mentions.
Iām really into the IndieWeb,
or the ideas behind it.
I like to own my data,
I like a space to play and experiment,
I like the idea of syndicating content
to be read/experienced in a variety of formats.
I love microformats,
and RSS feeds,
and⦠wait⦠how do webmentions work?
Reflections on making theater, and my family reacting to it.
What does it mean to be a person ā
to have a body, and live in it ā
to make choices, and change over time ā
to tell the truth?
Cascade layers are a new CSS feature
that allows us to define
explicit contained layers of specificity.
A Denver-based rock/punk/Americana band
featuring members of Teacup Gorilla,
Altas, PEZZ, Rat Bites, and Out on Bail.
Miriam talks to Now What?
about why the internet looks the way it does,
why designers and developers need to collaborate
and how the future of the web
must be built around inclusivity and respect.
We discuss the role of the ādesign engineerā
and what it means for workflows,
collab with their product team,
and the end-user experience.
Over the last decade,
Responsive Web Design and Object Oriented CSS
have grown from exciting new trends
into the foundations of modern, component-driven web design.
But our medium is not done evolving.
A monkey hitting keys at random
for an infinite amount of time
will eventually want some help writing Hamlet (or whatever).
Youāre the monkey. Weāre here to help.
A podcast focusing on front end development
but also covering a wide range of web development and design topics.
We talked about CSS, Sass,
and work being done in the W3C CSS Working Group.
Igaliaās Brian Kardell
sits down to chat with Miriam and Rachel Andrew
about who works on standards,
and who pays for that work.
In this episode of Syntax,
Scott and Wes talk with Miriam
about all things CSS ā
container queries, layers, scoping, and more!
I talk with Claire and Steph
about my journey into webdev and onto the CSSWG,
what I find frustrating about how others use CSS,
and the three specs Iām working on.
Working on a new CSS feature like Container Queries,
one of the most important considerations is
to ensure a āmigration pathā ā
a way for developers to start integrating the new code,
without breaking their sites on legacy browsers.
I chat with Bruce Lawson & Vadim Makeev
about Sass & Susy,
CSS Layers & compatibility,
Container Queries,
and the CSS Working Group.
Starting a new season of the Smashing Podcast
with a look at the future of CSS.
What new specs will be landing in browsers soon?
Drew McLellan talks to Miriam to find out.
Media-queries allow an author
to make style changes
based on the overall viewport dimensions ā
but in many cases,
authors would prefer styling modular components
based on their context within a layout.
New CSS proposals like Container Queries,
Cascade Layers, Scoped Styles, and Nesting
are all aimed at improving the way we write
responsive components and design systems.
CSS Custom Properties (aka Cascading Variables)
have gained broad browser support since 2015 ā
but what are they good for,
and why do we need them?
āWhat is one thing you learned about building websites this year?ā
I join Ari, Ben, and Tessa to talk about
getting into CSS from other languages,
the absurdly massive problem CSS is designed to solve,
and the mental model behind the language.
As I spend more of my time
working on the CSS language,
I wanted a place to take notes
and explore new ideas in the open.
How do we write code that is modular & maintainable,
in a language designed to be systematic & contextual?
The Cascade makes CSS unique ā
forcing us to revisit
even the most common programming feature: the variable.
CSS Containment Level 3
defines Container Queries
and container-relative units ā
allowing authors to build more intrinsic
responsive components
without knowledge of the overall layout.
Cascade & Inheritance Level 6
defines scoped styles ā
allowing authors to provide bounded ranges
for selector-matching,
and give priority to
more āproximateā scope origins.
Cascade & Inheritance Level 5
defines Cascade Layers ā
allowing authors to define
explicit contained layers of specificity.
Learn how design engineering
brings together form and function.
From the very start,
āweb designā has posed a nearly impossible paradox.
CSS Custom Properties allow
us to manage and control both cascade and inheritance in new ways.
Jina and I answer questions about CSS, Sass, Design Systems, and more!
A spinoff of the Party Corgi Network discord.
I chat with Chris Biscardi about
The CSS Working Group,
open-source projects,
art, and music.
I wrote this at the start of the Iraq war (2003),
and later made the short film.
Itās been on my mind again
during COVID-19 isolation.
I was invited to join the CSS Working Group
to help develop the next level of
Cascading & Inheritance ā
along with Container Queries,
CSS scoping, and more.
Sommer asked people to record themselves reading a poem
from her collection, Backup Singers.
I put together this video
of the poem Alcohol affects the frontal cortex.
āWhat about building websites has you interested this year?ā
Firefox 69 was the first to implement selector feature queries,
but other browsers are following suit.
Iāll show you how it works,
and how to start using this new feature query right away.
Horizontal text overflow has always been difficult to manage on the web.
The default visible overflow
is designed to make sure content remains accessible
no matter the size of a containing box,
but itās not our only option.
Why waste your time on half-measures?
Make your site THE MOST NORMALEST
with this ULTIMATE CSS RESET.
When weāre scrolling down a page,
or through a gallery of images,
snap-targets can help guide us from one section or image to the next.
In the past, developers have used JavaScript to hijack scrolling,
but now we can manage scroll alignment directly in CSS
with only a few lines of code.
I drop by the show to talk about Sass in 2019,
design tokens, Oddbird, unused CSS, new CSS properties,
and Dave & Chrisā explanation of revert.
The display
property has been in CSS from the beginning,
handling everything from block
and inline
boxes
to list-items
and full layout systems like flexbox
or grid
.
Now the display
syntax is getting an upgrade
to match itās multiple uses.
There are a number of property & value combinations
that can lead to CSS being inactive,
and now Firefox will tell you why.
Open the developer tools,
and look for the greyed-out property with an info-box on hover.
Itās a common pattern to align form labels and inputs in grid-like layout.
Iāll show you how to do it quickly using CSS subgrid,
with several quick fallbacks.
The web is designed to work across platforms,
devices, languages, and interfaces ā
but how can we possibly design for that
unknown and always-changing canvas?
Card layouts are popular on the web,
rows and columns of boxes with similar content.
CSS grids can help align those cards,
but itās still be hard to line-up content inside the cards ā
headers and footers that might need more or less room.
For years,
weāve struggled to build resilient layouts on the web,
but CSS Grid promises to change all that ā
and you can start using it now,
with only a few properties and basic concepts.
Iāve often used initial
and unset
in my CSS ā
global keywords that can be applied to any property.
The difference is small, but important:
unset
allows inheritance,
while initial
does not.
But then Firefox implemented revert
and I was confused ā
how is this one different from the others?!
Sass recently launched a new module system.
The new syntax will replace @import
with
@use
and @forward
ā
a big step forward for making Sass partials
more readable, performant, and safe.
Love it or hate it, CSS is weird:
not quite markup,
not quite programming in the imperative sense,
and nothing like the design programs we use for print.
How did we get here?
When you create lists in HTML,
browsers add bullet-points or numbers we call list markers.
Now CSS gives us the tools to style those list markers,
and even create our own!
In the CSS naming-convention arms race to lowest specificity,
Iāve decided to only use universal *
selectors.
I call it F*CSS.
We start by talking about
design systems and design tooling ā
how they differ,
and the problems they solve.
Iāve been working with Mozilla
to help create a new resource
for web professionals ā
with a mix of videos,
articles, demos, and open source tools.
Pushing past the āvariableā metaphor,
CSS Custom Properties can provide new ways
to balance context and isolation
in our patterns and components.
A reflection on change,
desire, choice,
and the stories we tell about ourselves
Steve Jenkins interviews me
about the state of CSS,
and whatās coming next for the language ā
from Intrinsic Design
to Dynamic CSS.
From building beautiful sites
to maintaining complex design systems
across multiple applications,
CSS is the web-language of design.
Thunder Nerds interview me
before her talk at VueConf US 2019.
Erin talks about fainting
from too much empathy
before my surgery.
an un-rehearsed play by Greg Wohead
The panel and the guest talk about grid systems,
fonts, and more!
I was invited to perform
a Vagina Monologue,
and ended up writing my own.
A family struggles to find humanity and normalcy
in a world made uncertain and strange
after the transformation and āotheringā of one of their own.
This physical theatre piece imagines what happens
on the other side of the iconic door
in Kafkaās Metamorphosis.
On Episode 18,
the TalkScript team continues the live-ish at JSConfUS podcast series
with guests Myles Borins, Tim Doherty, and Miriam Suzanne. Listen in!
Donāt let the declarative syntax fool you ā
CSS is a powerful and dynamic programming language.
The Journal of Mennonite Writing
asked me to submit
for their queer issue.
I donāt identify as Mennonite,
but I did grow up in the church,
so I asked my friends what to write about.
They suggested the common question:
In a world without rigid gender roles,
would anyone need to be trans?
Yesterday,
I shared an article about my impending surgery,
and a request for help ā
both social and financial ā
as I go through this.
I was embarrassed to ask,
and not sure what to expect,
but your response has been swift and overwhelming.
I canāt thank you enough,
but Iāll keep trying.
Denver Health has started offering vaginoplasty
in addition to their other trans medical services.
While Iāve been on the waitlist
for various surgeons around the country,
Denver Health called me this week
to give me a date: September 10,
less than two months away.
Trans-femme 90ās-alt sad-girl rock
An LGBT concert of writers and composers
by the Playground Ensemble,
with three works by LGBT authors and the composers.
Style Guides & Pattern Libraries are great tools
for documenting the relationships between code and design,
but beautiful docs are only half the battle.
We are not here to flatter egotism,
or prop up humbug;
we are merely telling the [queer] story.
We value what is good in the book;
but we believe in the existence of other,
and more vivid kinds of goodness.
A non-technical guide
for taking your project from concept to launch,
without ever losing sight of the goals.
āI donāt have many guy friends, but my guitarist is one.
Parting, I lean in for the cheek-kiss
but he plants a good one right on my lips.ā
I used exerpts from
Body & Gender Fragments
to talk about the contradictions
of transition ā
a sort of ācrossing overā without going anywhere.
Inspired by Robin Rendle,
I demonstrate some of my early experiments
combining CSS Grids and custom properties
to create dynamic layouts and data-visualizations.
At the family vacation in Moab,
everyone is doing their best.
Itās not enough,
and my day is peppered with the wrong name and pronouns.
I hide in my room through dinner
so they wonāt see me crying.
āIāve seen myself in the mirror.
I find me⦠disorienting.
What do they see that I donāt?
Why arenāt they laughing at me?ā
Sass is the most mature, stable,
and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world.
āMother finds me at her wardrobe, in her pumps and pearls.
What are you doing?
Being a mommy.
Are you, then?
She clips on the earrings (they pinch!),
reaches for her lipstick.ā
Explore the history of web layout
with the creator of Susy ā
why grid systems exist,
how they work,
and practical tips to avoid using them.
A reflection on the nature and value of productivity for the
SuperYesMore series: The Human in the Machine.
Viewport units have been around for several years now,
with near-perfect support in the major browsers,
but I keep finding new and exciting ways to use them.
I thought it would be fun to review the basics,
and then round-up some of my favorite use-cases.
I wasnāt born in the wrong body.
I was born, a body.
Without my body, I donāt exist.
It feels like CSS Grid has been coming for a long time now,
but it just now seems to be reaching a point
where folks are talking more and more about it
and that itās becoming something we should learning.
Iām still reeling from this year of insults,Ā
a traumatizing campaign turned traumatic election.
Iām not sad about a contest lost,
but what those results mean
for real people around me.
2016 is over,
but 2017 is going to be even harder.
Thereās a lot of language that gets thrown around,
but much of it comes loaded with
over-simplified baggage and misconceptions.
Here are a few that have been on my mind ā
from gender identity to biological sex,
transition, passing, and visibility.
Itās been a month
since our country pseudo-elected
a bigoted blow-hard for president.
Iām heading to DC to protest his inauguration in January,
visit friends,
and go on a mixed-media resistance tourā¦
No matter what acronym drives your selectors
(BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, ETC),
loops can help keep your patterns more readable and maintainable,
baking them directly into your code.
Weāll take a look at what loops can do,
and how to use them in the major CSS preprocessors.
Miriam Suzanne creates experimental experiences
with her band and her fellow developers.
Blog for people who make websites
Chris Coyier interviews Miriam
when she joins the CSS Tricks team
as a Staff Writer.
We talk about gettting started in the industry,
name confusion,
fouding OddBird,
building Susy,
and more.
In this episode of the Versioning Show,
Tim and David are joined by Miriam Suzanne,
best known for Susy, a responsive layout toolkit for Sass.
They discuss going from being a lurker to finding your voice,
the importance of writing about what youāre learning,
stumbling into fame, approaching new projects, and unit testing in Sass.
The writing and comedy of Jordan Wieleba
There are some questions that come up again and again
if you are trans.
A few of those questions are terrible,
but most of them are well-intentioned.
Iām lucky to have a supportive community around me,
so I thought Iād write down my most common answers
to help ease your stress about
getting it right,
and ease my stress about
answering the same questions over and over.
Style Guides & Pattern Libraries are great tools
for documenting the relationships between code and design,
but beautiful docs are only half the battle.
Using Sass, you can write your stylesheets in a more concise,
dynamic, and readable way, and cut down many of
the repetitive tasks that come with writing vanilla CSS.
This book provides a thorough introduction to
Sass for the beginner.
Co-writen with my friend
Kitty Giraudel.
Design systems streamline development,
communication, and consistency ā
but often rely on dedicated
teams and extended budgets.
A project-managerās reflections on human-centered problem-solving,
client communication,
and user feedback in agile web development.
Try to locate the moon.
Look longingly at the sky.
Talk to others.
Donāt lose track of where you are.
This is the invitation from the Warbler
to the other canyon inhabitants of the audience.
Founded in 2001,
The UMS is an annual three-day celebration of music
featuring hundreds of bands across multiple venues.
Weāre excited to be part of the single release for
Species of the Stars by our good friends
Open to the Hound!
Teacup Gorillaās debut album
An interview with the insightful
Ryo Yamaguchi
at Michigan Quarterly Review.
A fragmented memory of friendship ā
navigating fluid genders, relationships,
and bodies that resist order, category, or completion.
Inspired by Margaret Clap,
and the many myths of Hermaphroditus.
Design systems must be
meaningful to both humans and machines
Accoutrement provides Sass design-token management
that improves readability and consistency,
while encouraging automation.
Maps are a powerful data type in Sass ā
perfect for managing color and scale palettes,
framework configuration, data storage, and more.
an introduction to the Susy layout toolkit
Not our album,
but we did write a few of the songsā¦
a case-study in building and sharing open-source Sass
True is a full-featured unit-testing library for Sass.
The core functionality is written in pure SassScript,
so it can be used anywhere Sass is compiled.
Advanced features are available
with our JS test-runner integration.
a series of articles on creative process
Collaboration doesnāt have to be a social activity.
Successful collaboration is knowing when to bring people together
and when to send them home with individual assignments.
An archival rhizome ecology in ten parts,
and a reflection on the obsolescence of obsolescence ā
documented on the cloud,
and open-sourced as a defense against post-post-obsolescence.
A novel about new love,
moving apart,
and what comes next.
A love story, and an after-love story ā
told wiith poetry and pictures.
People are queer.
People are edge cases.
We fall between meanings,
and explore outside them.
For a few years,
Teacup Gorilla
performed & recorded music with
Rachel Eisenstat ā
initially as Iron City,
and later as Raven Jane.
For a few years,
Teacup Gorilla
performed & recorded music with
Rachel Eisenstat ā
initially as Iron City,
and later as Raven Jane.
Thanks to Chuck Mee for some borrowed wordsā¦
A modern, theatrical interpretation
of the Catholic Mass ā
created by Grapefruit Lab
and Teacup Gorilla.
Combining the sacrifice, transcendence, blood,
and circumstance of the Catholic Mass with history,
live music, science, dance, literature,
and pop culture to find a wholly modern communion experience.
What we have left is our selves,
broken and battered,
but surviving together.
Teacup Gorilla inhabits the venues of Denver, CO
with dark indie-rock soundscapes and evocative poetry ā
often compared to early Modest Mouse,
Explosions in the Sky,
or the Velvet Underground.
Part science lab, part disco,
Roller Skating With My Cousin
is a lively, dark romp
in which synchronized roller skaters
build a tower under a star-flecked mirror ball sky.
She is a plain and pensive woman.
He is a rather ordinary man who lives in an extraordinary house.
This house does algebraic equations and plots violence.
One evening, woman, man, and house collide;
not all of them survive.
We want to make art without assumptions ā
art that humanizes
and entertains
and challenges
and brings people into conversation.
Susy is a lightweight grid-layout engine for Sass,
designed to simplify and clarify responsive grid layouts
without ever getting in your way.
Originally released in 2009,
Susy has become one of the
most popular layout frameworks on the web.
The citizens are easily roused and swayed,
as a culture of fear infects the city
with the constant threat of execution.
Inspired by Georg Büchnerās unfinished masterpiece, Woyzeck,
The LIDA Project reinterprets
the story of a young soldier
returning from the horrors of war.
We created this site-specific
and interactive performance
as an opening act for the Dresden Dolls ā
performed in the lobby.
A parable play and fantastic spectacle,
warning of the dangers of a desperate populace
handing over power to a corrupt leader.
Founded in 1995,
The LIDA Project is a meta-media art collective
dedicated to experimental live performance.
I co-founded OddBird
with my brothers in 2008
to create scalable,
accessible,
and performant web applications
with a human-centered design.
Rachel Corrie (April 10, 1979 ā March 16, 2003)
was an American member of the
International Solidarity Movement (ISM)
who traveled to the Gaza Strip
during the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
She was killed when she tried to obstruct
a Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer o
perated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF.)
Countdown to Zero is a political theatre collective
established in 2007 by Brian Freeland & Julie Rada.
The collective has committed to a series of 10 theatrical works
(10 counting down to zero)
at which time the collective will disband.
Blues-inflected bright/dark music
An action comedy for the stage,
based on our favorite movie tropes.
The script was devised by the entire ensemble,
lead by Michelle Milne, Miriam,
Emily Swora, and Ben Jacobs.
I donāt believe this is the final scriptā¦
A live action comedy,
inspired by the movies,
and created by our ensemble.
A sister and brother dig through the rubble of their livesā¦
OCD and love produce the same chemical in the brainā¦
a ten minute play, and short film
We hurt ourselves for loveā¦
Itās not a great script,
but it was my full-length directorial debut.
a play in one act, and a short film
Reflections of a Mennonite
holocaust survivor
after the war
Based on a series of interviews
with Annie in 2003,
this play was produced first by Goshen College
as a runner-up
for the International Peace Play Contest,
and then in collabiration with New World Arts
for my senior thesis production.
a glimpse of the aftermath
A glittering tragedy,
a passionate romance,
and an internship opportunity.
I worked on
Antony & Cleopatra
with Penny Metropulos
and the wonderful OSF ensemble,
as a Stage Management Intern.
I also got to work with the
lighting & electrical department
while I was there.
Some brutal Sam Sheppardā¦
I worked as Master Electrician of
the college theater and music performance venues,
while I studied theater, writing, and visual art.
The play by Wendy MacLeod.
My first forray into professional theater,
as a lighting designer for
New World Arts.
Founded in 1998 as New World Players,
we produced original & alternative ensemble theater
for over a decade ā
along with an art gallery and event space.