css-is-awesome blog Engineering the system, and the new CSS found along the way. https://cssisawesome.com/feed.xml 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z CSS anchor positioning is a dropdown engine https://cssisawesome.com/blog/css-anchor-positioning-dropdown-engine/ 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen anchor-name, three inset lines, and position-try-fallbacks replace the positioning half of a dropdown library — trigger-width menus that flip above the trigger when the viewport would clip them, re-evaluated by the browser on every open. Printing a design system https://cssisawesome.com/blog/printing-a-design-system/ 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen cia's pages turn into real printed documents — cover, table index, numbered sheets, followable links — with zero JavaScript and no PDF library. The generator was in the browser the whole time; we only had to ship the styling layer, and each honest-looking feature hid a smaller, sharper bug than we expected. The popover attribute's invisible UA stylesheet https://cssisawesome.com/blog/the-popover-attributes-invisible-ua-stylesheet/ 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen Half of what makes [popover] work is user-agent CSS you can silently destroy with one innocent declaration. Three ways we broke it — a permanently open menu, a menu that refused to be full-width, and the inset trick that un-centers the overlay. There is no :nth-of-class, and it will bite you https://cssisawesome.com/blog/there-is-no-nth-of-class/ 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen nth-of-type counts element types, not classes — and the selector everyone assumes exists, :nth-of-class, never has. How one same-type sibling shifts every index by one, why the bug looks wired while being broken, and the modern selector that finally fixes it. The tabs that highlighted but never switched https://cssisawesome.com/blog/the-tabs-that-highlighted-but-never-switched/ 2026-09-04T00:00:00Z 2026-09-04T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen A zero-JS tabs component shipped with a one-element off-by-one that CSS can't even express a fix for — and the only reason we found it was converting the docs to live demos. A post-mortem, plus everything else that changed in one very long day. The import in our README did not work https://cssisawesome.com/blog/the-import-in-our-readme-did-not-work/ 2026-08-18T00:00:00Z 2026-08-18T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen Sass does not read package.json exports. Both documented imports failed on a clean install, and every check we had stayed green. A barrel that emits nothing https://cssisawesome.com/blog/a-barrel-that-emits-nothing/ 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen Next.js CSS Modules reject a top-level :root, so cia's authoring entry point had to print zero bytes until a mixin is called. Here is how, and what it cost. An MCP server for a CSS library https://cssisawesome.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-a-css-library/ 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen Agents guess at mixin signatures because prose docs give them nothing to query. cia ships a stdio MCP server that reads the SCSS instead. What broke along the way. From 0.8 to 1.0 https://cssisawesome.com/blog/from-0-8-to-1-0/ 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen We cut 1.0 on 2026-08-17 with 24 of 42 planned stories done and an entire epic unstarted. Here is the reasoning, and what actually changed. Print to PDF with zero JavaScript https://cssisawesome.com/blog/print-to-pdf-with-zero-javascript/ 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z 2026-08-26T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen The browser already ships a PDF generator. cia's print layer is four mixins, three CSS variables, and no JavaScript at all. Recipes, not components https://cssisawesome.com/blog/recipes-not-components/ 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen cia ships markdown patterns instead of a component library. Here is what that buys you, and the bug fix you give up to get it. The validator that wasn't looking https://cssisawesome.com/blog/the-validator-that-wasnt-looking/ 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen Seven themes scored 0 of 17 contrast pairs and the validator still printed a green check. A post-mortem on 119 silent skips and the parser that caused them. Your brand comes with you https://cssisawesome.com/blog/your-brand-comes-with-you/ 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z 2026-08-17T00:00:00Z Jerry Hansen npx cia migrate reads your Tailwind config or Bootstrap variables and writes a cia theme.scss, with a confidence rating on every token it maps.