Drew Minns is a Developer, Designer and Educator from Toronto, Canada. Currently working as Lead Instructor and Developer for HackerYou, Drew stays on the edge of the industry to educate those around him.
The development of CSS, like all languages, is an iterative process. With every major release, we get new features and syntaxes that help us write our styles. CSS Level 3 introduced features that enable us to design interactions that previously were possible only with JavaScript. With every new day, tools emerge to make styling easier and more flexible.
One of the relatively recent tools introduced for styling is PostCSS. PostCSS aims to reinvent CSS with an ecosystem of custom plugins and tools. Working with the same principles of preprocessors such as Sass and LESS, it transforms extended syntaxes and features into modern, browser-friendly CSS.
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Often within a project, the presentation of our content changes based on certain needs. We see this when we use media queries to change our styles based on the user device. CSS quantity queries follow the same concept of changing the styles based on a condition: the condition within a quantity query being the number of sibling elements.
An example would be navigation where items are 25% wide when four items are available; yet when there are five items available, the width of the navigation items changes to 20%. This is a common problem with dynamic site frameworks like WordPress or Ghost. A client might not realize the complications that could arise, for example, by adding one more menu item when the CSS is not set up to fit it in.
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Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it: create a table of items. Each item should span a third of the content area, with the fourth item starting on a new row, much like floats. However, a particular item must always display the price at the end of the first row.
So if there are only two elements, the price element would be second. But if there are more than three items, the price would be the last element in the first row. You might assume that JavaScript would be the best solution — just loop over the items, and if there are more than three, update the styling. But what if I told you could do it with CSS alone?
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