Javascript

Learn the basics of CSS Filters

Published Oct 28, 2019

Updated Feb 14, 2023

5 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

We never thought we could so easily kick up the visuals of our documents. Well now we can! CSS Filters are really cool visual effects, and the most fun part of CSS.

Now, without trying our hands at Photoshop or any other editing tool, we can give the same effects to our images using the CSS Filters.

The Blur Effect - The blur effect can be applied to an element using the blur() function. This function accepts CSS length value as a parameter which defines the blur radius. A larger value will create more blur. If no parameter is provided, then a value 0 is used.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: blur(0|2px|5px); 
  filter: blur(0|2px|5px);
}

Image Brightness - The brightness() function can be used to set the brightness of an image. A value of 0% will create an image that is completely black. A value greater than 100% completely brightens the image while 100% or 1 leaves the image unchanged. Negative values are not allowed as a parameter to this function.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: brightness(50%|100%|200%); 
  filter: brightness(50%|100%|200%);
}

Image Contrast - The contrast() function is used to adjust the contrast on an image. A value of 0% will create an image that is completely black. A value greater than 100% completely brightens the image while 100% or 1 leaves the image unchanged.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: contrast(50%|100%|200%); 
  filter: contrast(50%|100%|200%);
}

Opacity - The opacity() function applies transparency to an image. Values between 0% and 100% are linear multipliers on the effect. The opacity filter effect is measured by the level of range from completely transparent to completely opaque.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: opacity(10%|40%|80%); 
  filter: opacity(10%|40%|80%);
}

The Sepia Effect - The sepia filter effect is a brownish-grey to dark yellowish-brown tone imparted to an element and is expressed in percentages from 0% to 100%.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: sepia(10%|40%|80%); 
  filter: sepia(10%|40%|80%);
}

Drop Shadow - This adds to a shadow to the image and is similar to what box-shadow does.

.image-1{
  drop-shadow(0);
}

.image-2 {
  -webkit-filter: drop-shadow(4px 4px 10px yellow);
  filter: drop-shadow(4px 4px 10px yellow);
}

.image-3 {
  -webkit-filter: drop-shadow(8px 8px 12px yellow);
  filter: drop-shadow(8px 8px 12px yellow);
}

Grayscale - The grayscale() CSS function converts the input image to grayscale. Values between 0% and 100% are linear multipliers on the effect.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: grayscale(50%|100%|200%); 
  filter: grayscale(50%|100%|200%);
}

Hue Rotation - The CSS hue-rotate() function is used with the filter property to apply a hue rotation an image. A hue rotation is where you specify an angle around the color circle that the input samples will be adjusted by.

The CSS hue-rotate() function requires an argument to tell it how much to rotate the hue by.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: hue-rotate(0|100deg|250deg); 
  filter: hue-rotate(0|100deg|250deg);
}

The Invert Effect - The invert() CSS function inverts the color samples in the input image. 0% (0) is the default and represents the original image. 100% will make the image completely inverted. Negative values are not allowed.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: invert(0|40%|80%); 
  filter: invert(0|40%|80%);
}

Saturate - The saturate filter is used to vary the intensity of color in the element. A saturated element has overly bright colors; you can increase saturation on under-exposed images or vice versa. The amount of saturation can be expressed in percentages, where a value of 0% is completely un-saturated, and a value of 100% leaves the input unchanged.

.image-1 {
  -webkit-filter: saturate(10%|150%|350%); 
  filter: saturate(10%|150%|350%);
}

The CSS filters show the evolution of effects from SVG format and how effective they are. They make the images look more impactful with minimum efforts. Each filter has an essential purpose to apply the effect to a graphics element or container element

Current browser and user agent support can be found from the [@_"Can I use..." table for CSS3 Filter Effects] (https://caniuse.com/#search=css%20filter);

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In this episode of the Modern Web Podcast, CSS expert Kevin Powell discusses the evolution of CSS, from the early days of CSS3 to the rapid advancements with Flexbox, Grid, and the latest innovations. Kevin explains how CSS is making strides to integrate features that previously required JavaScript, like scroll-driven animations and popovers, simplifying development and improving performance. He also touches on the importance of understanding the fundamentals of CSS, debugging techniques, and the future of tools like Tailwind and Sass. Chapters Here are the timestamped chapters for the episode: - 00:00 - Introduction and Technical Setup Issues - 01:05 - Guest Introduction: Kevin Powell - 02:00 - Kevin's Journey into CSS and Content Creation - 03:21 - Evolution of CSS: From CSS3 to Modern Features - 05:46 - The Role of JavaScript in CSS and New Features - 08:08 - Popovers, Anchor Positioning, and Progressive Enhancement in CSS - 10:26 - Discussion on SAS, Tailwind, and CSS Tools - 12:35 - Challenges with Tailwind and Over-Componentization - 14:57 - The Importance of Learning Core CSS Principles - 16:56 - The "CSS is Hard" Memes and Overcoming CSS Frustration - 19:12 - Formatting Contexts and Advanced CSS Concepts - 21:31 - Opportunities for Junior Developers to Master CSS - 23:54 - Browser Discrepancies and the Future of Web Standards - 26:14 - Refactoring CSS for Performance and Best Practices - 27:50 - Favorite CSS Resources and Conferences - 28:26 - Imposter Syndrome and Kevin's Speaking Journey - 29:55 - Closing Remarks and Where to Find Kevin Powell Online Follow Kevin Powell on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/KevinJPowell Github: https://github.com/kevin-powell YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/kevinpowell Sponsored by This Dot....

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CSSJavaScript

How to Truncate Strings Easily with CSS

You'll often need to truncate text when working with user interfaces, especially when displaying content within a limited space. CSS provides a straightforward way to handle this scenario, ensuring that long text strings are cut off gracefully without affecting the overall layout. CSS Truncation Techniques Single-Line Truncation If you want to truncate a single line of text, CSS provides a simple solution. The key properties to use here are overflow, white-space, and text-overflow. ` Explanation of properties: * white-space: nowrap: This ensures the text stays on a single line, preventing wrapping. * overflow: hidden: This hides any content that overflows the container. * text-overflow: ellipsis: This adds the ellipsis (…) at the end of the truncated text. Multi-Line Truncation While truncating a single line of text is common, sometimes you may want to display multiple lines but still cut off the text when it exceeds a certain number of lines. You can use a combination of CSS properties such as -webkit-line-clamp along with the display and overflow properties. ` Live example: Explanation of properties: * display: -webkit-box: This is a legacy flexbox-like display property that works with the -webkit-line-clamp property. * -webkit-line-clamp: Specifies the number of lines to show before truncating. * -webkit-box-orient: vertical: Ensures the box is laid out vertically for proper multi-line truncation. * overflow: hidden: Prevents content overflow. * text-overflow: ellipsis: Adds an ellipsis after the truncated content. Why Use CSS for Text Truncation Over JavaScript Techniques? While it’s possible to truncate text using JavaScript, CSS is often a better choice for this task for several reasons. Let's explore why CSS-based truncation techniques are generally preferred over JavaScript. Performance Efficiency CSS operates directly within the browser's layout engine, meaning it doesn’t require additional processing or event handling as JavaScript does. When using JavaScript to truncate text, the script needs to run on page load (or after DOM manipulation), and sometimes, it needs to listen for events such as window resizing to adjust truncation. This can introduce unnecessary overhead, especially in complex or resource-constrained environments like mobile devices. CSS, on the other hand, is declarative. Once applied, it allows the browser to handle text rendering without any further execution or processing. This leads to faster load times and a smoother user experience. Simplicity and Maintainability CSS solutions are much simpler to implement and maintain than their JavaScript counterparts. All it takes is a few lines of CSS to implement truncation. In contrast, a JavaScript solution would require you to write and maintain a function that manually trims strings, inserts ellipses, and re-adjusts the text whenever the window is resized. Here's the JavaScript Truncation Example to compare the complexity: JavaScript Truncation Example: ` At the example above, we truncated the text to 50 characters which may be 1 line on large screens and 6 lines on mobile and in that case we will need to add more code to truncate it responsively. As you can see, the CSS solution we used earlier is more concise and readable, whereas the JavaScript version is more verbose and requires managing the string length manually. Responsiveness Without Extra Code With CSS, truncation can adapt automatically to different screen sizes and layouts. You can use relative units (like percentages or vw/vh), media queries, or flexbox/grid properties to ensure the text truncates appropriately in various contexts. If you were using JavaScript, you’d need to write additional logic to detect changes in the viewport size and update the truncation manually. This would likely involve adding event listeners for window resize events, which can degrade performance and lead to more complex code. CSS Example for Responsive Truncation: ` To achieve this in JavaScript, you’d need to add more code to handle the width adjustments dynamically, making it more complex to maintain and troubleshoot. Separation of Concerns CSS handles the presentation layer of your website, while JavaScript should focus on dynamic functionality or data manipulation. By keeping truncation logic within your CSS, you're adhering to the principle of separation of concerns, where each layer of your web application has a clear, well-defined role. Using JavaScript for visual tasks like truncation mixes these concerns, making your codebase harder to maintain, debug, and scale. CSS is purpose-built for layout and visual control, and truncation is naturally a part of that domain. Browser Support and Cross-Browser Consistency Modern CSS properties like text-overflow and -webkit-line-clamp are widely supported across all major browsers. This means that CSS solutions for truncation are generally consistent and reliable. JavaScript solutions, on the other hand, may behave differently depending on the browser environment and require additional testing and handling for cross-browser compatibility. While older browsers may not support specific CSS truncation techniques (e.g., multi-line truncation), fallback options (like single-line truncation) can be easily managed through CSS alone. With JavaScript, more complex logic might be required to handle such situations. Reduced Risk of Layout Shifting JavaScript-based text truncation risks causing layout shifting, especially during initial page loads or window resizes. The browser may need to recalculate the layout multiple times, leading to content flashing or jumpy behavior as text truncation is applied. CSS-based truncation is applied as part of the browser’s natural rendering flow, eliminating this risk and ensuring a smoother experience for the user. Conclusion CSS is the optimal solution for truncating text in most cases due to its simplicity, efficiency, and responsiveness. It leverages the power of the browser’s rendering engine, avoids the overhead of JavaScript, and keeps your code clean and maintainable. While JavaScript truncation has its use cases, CSS should always be your go-to solution for truncating strings, especially in static or predictable layouts. If you like this post, check out the other CSS posts on our blog!...

Sep 13, 2024

4 mins

CSS

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

As web developers, we're often working with data from external sources like APIs we don't control or user inputs submitted to our backends. We can't always rely on this data to take the form we expect, and we can encounter unexpected errors when it deviates from expectations. But with the Zod library, we can define what our data ought to look like and parse the incoming data against those defined schemas. This lets us work with that data confidently, or to quickly throw an error when it isn't correct. Why use Zod? TypeScript is great for letting us define the shape of our data in our code. It helps us write more correct code the first time around by warning us if we are doing something we shouldn't. But TypeScript can't do everything for us. For example, we can define a variable as a string or a number, but we can't say "a string that starts with user_id_ and is 20 characters long" or "an integer between 1 and 5". There are limits to how much TypeScript can narrow down our data for us. Also, TypeScript is a tool for us developers. When we compile our code, our types are not available to the vanilla JavaScript. JavaScript can't validate that the data we actually use in our code matches what we thought we'd get when we wrote our TypeScript types unless you're willing to manually write code to perform those checks. This is where we can reach for a tool like Zod. With Zod, we can write data schemas. These schemas, in the simplest scenarios, look very much like TypeScript types. But we can do more with Zod than we can with TypeScript alone. Zod schemas let us create additional rules for data parsing and validation. A 20-character string that starts with user_id_? It's z.string().startsWith('user_id_').length(20). An integer between 1 and 5 inclusive? It's z.number().int().gte(1).lte(5). Zod's primitives give us many extra functions to be more specific about *exactly* what data we expect. Unlike TypeScript, Zod schemas aren't removed on compilation to JavaScript—we still have access to them! If our app receives some data, we can verify that it matches the expected shape by passing it to your Zod schema's parse function. You'll either get back your data in exactly the shape you defined in your schema, or Zod will give you an error to tell you what was wrong. Zod schemas aren't a replacement for TypeScript; rather, they are an excellent complement. Once we've defined our Zod schema, it's simple to derive a TypeScript type from it and to use that type as we normally would. But when we really need to be sure our data conforms to the schema, we can always parse the data with our schema for that extra confidence. Defining Data Schemas Zod schemas are the variables that define our expectations for the shape of our data, validate those expectations, and transform the data if necessary to match our desired shape. It's easy to start with simple schemas, and to add complexity as required. Zod provides different functions that represent data structures and related validation options, which can be combined to create larger schemas. In many cases, you'll probably be building a schema for a data object with properties of some primitive type. For example, here's a schema that would validate a JavaScript object representing an order for a pizza: ` Zod provides a number of primitives for defining schemas that line up with JavaScript primitives: string, number, bigint, boolean, date, symbol, undefined, and null. It also includes primitives void, any, unknown, and never for additional typing information. In addition to basic primitives, Zod can define object, array, and other native data structure schemas, as well as schemas for data structures not natively part of JavaScript like tuple and enum. The documentation contains considerable detail on the available data structures and how to use them. Parsing and Validating Data with Schemas With Zod schemas, you're not only telling your program what data should look like; you're also creating the tools to easily verify that the incoming data matches the schema definitions. This is where Zod really shines, as it greatly simplifies the process of validating data like user inputs or third party API responses. Let's say you're writing a website form to register new users. At a minimum, you'll need to make sure the new user's email address is a valid email address. For a password, we'll ask for something at least 8 characters long and including one letter, one number, and one special character. (Yes, this is not really the best way to write strong passwords; but for the sake of showing off how Zod works, we're going with it.) We'll also ask the user to confirm their password by typing it twice. First, let's create a Zod schema to model these inputs: ` So far, this schema is pretty basic. It's only making sure that whatever the user types as an email is an email, and it's checking that the password is at least 8 characters long. But it is *not* checking if password and confirmPassword match, nor checking for the complexity requirements. Let's enhance our schema to fix that! ` By adding refine with a custom validation function, we have been able to verify that the passwords match. If they don't, parsing will give us an error to let us know that the data was invalid. We can also chain refine functions to add checks for our password complexity rules: ` Here we've chained multiple refine functions. You could alternatively use superRefine, which gives you even more fine grained control. Now that we've built out our schema and added refinements for extra validation, we can parse some user inputs. Let's see two test cases: one that's bound to fail, and one that will succeed. ` There are two main ways we can use our schema to validate our data: parse and safeParse. The main difference is that parse will throw an error if validation fails, while safeParse will return an object with a success property of either true or false, and either a data property with your parsed data or an error property with the details of a ZodError explaining why the parsing failed. In the case of our example data, userInput2 will parse just fine and return the data for you to use. But userInput1 will create a ZodError listing all of the ways it has failed validation. ` ` We can use these error messages to communicate to the user how they need to fix their form inputs if validation fails. Each error in the list describes the validation failure and gives us a human readable message to go with it. You'll notice that the validation errors for checking for a valid email and for checking password length have a lot of details, but we've got three items at the end of the error list that don't really tell us anything useful: just a custom error of Invalid input. The first is from our refine checking if the passwords match, and the second two are from our refine functions checking for password complexity (numbers and special characters). Let's modify our refine functions so that these errors are useful! We'll add our own error parameters to customize the message we get back and the path to the data that failed validation. ` Now, our error messages from failures in refine are informative! You can figure out which form fields aren't validating from the path, and then display the messages next to form fields to let the user know how to remedy the error. ` By giving our refine checks a custom path and message, we can make better use of the returned errors. In this case, we can highlight specific problem form fields for the user and give them the message about what is wrong. Integrating with TypeScript Integrating Zod with TypeScript is very easy. Using z.infer<typeof YourSchema> will allow you to avoid writing extra TypeScript types that merely reflect the intent of your Zod schemas. You can create a type from any Zod schema like so: ` Using a TypeScript type derived from a Zod schema does *not* give you any extra level of data validation at the type level beyond what TypeScript is capable of. If you create a type from z.string.min(3).max(20), the TypeScript type will still just be string. And when compiled to JavaScript, even that will be gone! That's why you still need to use parse/safeParse on incoming data to validate it before proceeding as if it really does match your requirements. A common pattern with inferring types from Zod schemas is to use the same name for both. Because the schema is a variable, there's no name conflict if the type uses the same name. However, I find that this can lead to confusing situations when trying to import one or the other—my personal preference is to name the Zod schema with Schema at the end to make it clear which is which. Conclusion Zod is an excellent tool for easily and confidently asserting that the data you're working with is exactly the sort of data you were expecting. It gives us the ability to assert at runtime that we've got what we wanted, and allows us to then craft strategies to handle what happens if that data is wrong. Combined with the ability to infer TypeScript types from Zod schemas, it lets us write and run more reliable code with greater confidence....

Nov 15, 2024

7 mins

JavaScriptZod

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2 mins

VueNuxtJS

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Learn the basics of CSS Filters

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