Relative colors make so many things easier!

Looking to step up your CSS Game? I have free and premium courses 👉 kevinpowell.co/courses?...
🔗 Links
✅ The codepens from this video: codepen.io/collection/rxgzzv
✅ Mattias Ott’s CSS Day Talk: • Web Design Engineering...
✅ Chrome for Developers post: developer.chrome.com/blog/css...
✅ MDN on relative colors: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/d...
✅ Browser support: caniuse.com/css-relative-colors
⌚ Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
00:39 - the basics and syntax of relative colors
02:33 - How to manipulate the color values
06:25 - Browser support
07:05 - Practical use cases
#css
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[@screamtwice]

I want to share this with all the backend dev's that have teased us frontend devs by saying "but you just change colors right?"

[@bazzle_brush]

They think it's easy but when you review their CSS or JS it's absolute💩

[@keessonnema]

@@bazzle_brush They still use the easy "jQuery lib". Horrific!

[@user-lq7xz1th4x]

lol

[@miguel213]

​@@bazzle_brushfull stack of 💩

[@nilaallj]

There is one important thing worth noting regarding browser support that Can I Use doesn’t show: The current Safari implementation is based on an older version of the specification. This seems to be fixed in Technology Preview, but it’s not yet in stable (and I have not seen this mentioned in the release notes for the 17.6 nor 18.0 betas). The main interoperability issue between the two specs is that the current one implemented in Chrome and Firefox treats the color channel tokens as unitless values in calculations, whereas the older spec implemented in Safari gives many of those tokens an implicit unit, such as `%` or `deg`. As such, by adhering to the Safari behavior, you risk making the entire declaration in Chrome invalid and vice versa. This is only important to keep in mind when using addition or subtraction on certain color channels, since you can’t for example subtract `180deg` or `20%` with a unitless value or vice versa (but you can multiply and divide). Worth noting is also that Safari treats the channels in relative rgb colors as values between 0% - 100%, whereas in Chrome they are unitless values between 0 - 255 (still not a problem if you use multiplication or division). Relative (ok)lab colors don’t have this problem since all those channels are unitless in both implementations. Same for chroma and lightness (but not hue) in relative (ok)lch colors. It’s also worth underlining that both implementations accept unit values not inside a calc function. Luckily you can test for both behaviors using support queries. That opens up for a solution looking something like this: :root { /* Test for the correct behavior implemented in Chrome, Firefox and Safari TP */ @supports (color: hsl(from red calc(h + 1) calc(s + 1) l)) { --u-deg: 1; --u-%: 1; } /* Test for the old spec behavior in Safari. Returns false in Chrome, Firefox and Safari TP */ @supports (color: hsl(from red calc(h + 1deg) calc(s + 1%) l)) { --u-deg: 1deg; --u-%: 1%; } } .element-with-relative-color { color: hsl(from red calc(h + 25 * var(--u-deg)) s calc(l - 20 * var(--u-%))); }

[@clevermissfox]

This is one I’ve been checking on every two weeks and started using in an @supports last month ! Makes everything so clean and more convenient so I’m not having to manually convert hex values to oklch ❤ relative colours rock!!!

[@aCatSiki]

I remember trying to make this work in SASS last year. 😂 Now, it's finally a feature. Nice! 🎉

[@rodrigonoales]

Hey Kevin, everything you do with these videos is so great, clear and to the point... thank you... keep it up please !!!

[@fabsn182]

Opacity is great but being able to replace darken and lighten from scss with a way that supports custom properties is a big game changer for cleaner css (especially cleaner :root var definitions)

[@Eloii_Xia]

This feature is the best addition to CSS ever!! It makes implementing colorblind accessibility much easier on my projects!!!

[@emnific]

Absolutely love it, been waiting for something like this for years, thanks for sharing!

[@user-user-user37]

Amazing video! Always thankful to have someone cover on css features like this. 👍

[@sevenrichiewhite]

When I just want to change the brightness of a button on hover, I normally use filter: brightness(). I find this method more convenient for such cases. However, for creating color schemes and other fancy coloring, relative colors are fantastic. Thank you for showing this. It opens up so many opportunities. Thats why i love your channel. Learning more good stuff every day =)

[@victorvanrijn]

Great video Kevin! 💜

[@niza.v1]

I was using color-mix function for this type of things: color-mix(in srgb, red, transparent 50%) But now it’s much easier!

[@einatblackrose]

This is great! Thanks for sharing this.

[@AntonBregolas]

OMG, this! I couldn't believe this wasn't possible when I started trying to mix colors to achieve the right contrast for accessibility across several color schemes🙈Feels like CSS has been catching up with the developers' demands for yearzzz! Thanks for your great updates💚

[@EnricoAnsaloni]

This is very cool I can't wait to use it in production

[@CreativeJE]

This is great. Thanks for this.

[@webchimpnl]

Wow! That is just great. This is giving me a real nice color scale. Without opacity. Calculating from 68% (for this example) to 95% (really light version) in 9 steps.. --color-primary: hsl(227, 100%, 68%); --color-primary-10: hsl(from var(--color-primary) h s calc( l + (( 95 - l ) / 9) * 9 )); --color-primary-20: hsl(from var(--color-primary) h s calc( l + (( 95 - l ) / 9) * 8 )); etc...

[@nathanm2891]

This is great. I have been over using color-mix with transparent and a percentage to do this.

[@irlshrek]

ahh, its kind of like destructuring. so cool!

[@sedrakable]

Daym, this is actually a sick feature

[@zBrain0]

Super cool! I generally use hsl and constantly have to go and convert things. Now I can make the browser do my bidding for me

[@tundeoriyomi1186]

This came at the right time

[@LasTCursE69]

This is pretty cool gotta admit

[@FeliceFricker]

It's so pretty

[@k16e]

Right on the money!

[@awkward_coder]

Thanks!

[@KevinPowell]

Thanks 😊

[@stopcensoringmen5044]

You speak about CSS with such ease, despite a lot of the things having a skill curve of, "oh boy, I am going to need a separate video before I continue". That is the mark of the master.

[@dmytroprokoptsov7185]

OMG, it's just crazy) Kevin, can you advise something to read/watch about hsl and all this "weird" color functions? I where I could understand how this works) p.s you are a css monster and I happy that KZbin algos gave me your channel) hope one day I'll bought your course and say you thanks this way for all your job

[@user-ir8nd6mj2b]

wow, now you can create shaders!

[@victordan-jumbo6340]

Wow 😖where was this years ago... I had to use SASS and some hacky way of splitting the HSL in each variable 😭😪... thanks Kevin

[@DmitryLubenskiy]

I have a feeling css syntax is gonna be assemblish soon :)

[@jonmayer]

It would be interesting to see if you could make a full 3 or 4 color palette based on a single color tweaked up and down.

[@Chill31_]

I literally finished my project yesterday with the same exact issue. I had a accent color but had to constantly put it's value everywhere I wanted some transparency.

[@ErikBlomqvistSwe]

Kevin, when you were giving examples like `rgb(from purple r r r)` or `b b b`, you said "we don't really have a lot of red in there" and the text became gray. The reason for that is very easy: if you put the same value on all rgb channels, you always get a grayscaled color.

[@lacavernedug33k]

He said that because the text became rally dark, because the r value is low so he's getting a dark color. He then used the b because the b value was higher so the text was lighter, and so more legible because of the dark background.

[@ErikBlomqvistSwe]

@@lacavernedug33k but he also followed up the `b b b` with the comment "and then we might get a bit more of a color coming through", hence my original comment. But then again, I trust Kevin knowing what he's doing and it might just be the mouth running quicker than the brain sometimes. :)

[@nilaallj]

Here is another approach for hover/focus states using variables with fallback values. I think I’d prefer it in situations where declaring an extra variable for the origin color feels a bit verbose. button { background-color: oklch(from var(--clr-button) var(--bg-lightness, l) c h); &:hover { --bg-lightness: calc(l - 20); } }

[@KevinPowell]

oh, that's a cool idea!

[@tiloiam]

Careful adding/subtracting to color components as you can go out of gamut limits quite quickly e.g. oklch(from red l calc(c + 1) h). Prefer using multiply and divide.

[@imagineabout4153]

I love it. How about browser support?

[@imagineabout4153]

Just saw you already addressed it in the video. Thank you.

[@PurchaseLocallyInc.]

Great video! Question: How can you ensure the colors with these changes match the Color Safety within the WCAG Guidelines? Thanks! Colors aren't easy when it has to do with these guidelines. If you have any way to simplify the process of creating color schemes within these guidelines, I will forever be grateful.

[@everythingisfine9988]

So, can we sunset sass like with lodash? Both great products. Both advanced the developer experience. And both no longer necessary

[@joaorambodev]

Hey guys! I am always wondering where do you guys test these new CSS features, because when I try to do so in my React apps I can never achieve this. Not sure if I need to update something or if CSS updates are automatically spreaded over the code bases.

[@epiiiiiii]

This actually is a game changer. Except I need functions to completely replace my SASS madness color variant generator

[@bucztechph]

Can you make a video about vw vs w unit, why does vh used in height when creating a page website but not vw for width? I rarely see vw unit being used for width and percentage are frequently used over it. Im a html/css beginner

[@ZackPyle]

Hey Kevin, go look at the browser support link again? It's different than what you're showing in the video. They are all marked as partial support now...?

[@deatho0ne587]

Even though I like this for most cases and would use it on something like a blog. I feel like it has maintainability issues in the long term. Colors can change from season to season and due to how accessabilty works with colors this might not work for that. Not saying you can not edit all of the things per season, but it sort of goes back to the pre-way to do this stuff before.

[@FurkanKARADENIZ-tt8zf]

I have a question. I'm trying to understand the behavior of REM units when used for element positioning. While pixels (px) maintain a fixed position regardless of font size, using REM seems to lock the element's screen position and it is a good thing but i don't know if it is applicable to every scenario. I expected REM unit to cause some shifts in positioning based on the root font size. Can someone explain the relationship between using REM for positioning and how it affects an element's screen location?

[@v23452]

Can I ask for a good book or video course on modern css please? All cool stuff in one place

[@YacineBougera]

i was watching your videos for a while and i never heard you talking about lch and oklch.....this is my first time hearing them can u please make a simple video about them

[@helleyequeue]

I think tailwind made them even easier :D

[@Sanjeev_046]

Isn't there a way like using: color-mix(in srgb, var(--clr-brand) 20%, transparent); ?

[@KevinPowell]

That works too, yup! But this does more, as I show in the rest of the video :)

[@Sanjeev_046]

@@KevinPowell Yup, I commented too early 😬. Anyways, Thanks for the video ❤️

[@rnoureldin]

I really wonder from where to start on your channel???

[@aceenterprise]

Thanks Kevin, this is awesome, but I'm confused about 1 thing...why is it divide and not multiply? For example, if we take 200 and divide by 50%, that becomes 400, which is actually an increase in the values. Note - referring to the first part of the video.

[@KevinPowell]

It's not a division, it's just a visual separator between the color values and the opacity. If it was a division, it'd be inside a calc() or other math function.

[@aceenterprise]

@@KevinPowell Okay, that makes more sense, thank you very much for your response and wisdom. 🙂

[@marble_wraith]

Where's the postcss plugin?

[@frumbert]

Can you make the yellow button turn from black text to white text automatically if the contrast isn't high enough inside the hover state?

[@erickdavid4257]

There is an upcoming feature in CSS to do this, color-contrast()

[@frumbert]

@@erickdavid4257 Oh goody! 😁

[@brentjackson6966]

They keep adding more and more things to CSS. I think almost all of the added things are good but I do worry that we're heading towards a Franken-CSS monster with so much complexity that new web devs will be unable to learn enough for CSS to be a useful tool.

[@KevinPowell]

The nice thing is, all the new things are on top of what's already there. You can still learn the basics and make websites, and as you continue to learn, add the newer things. The hard part for new devs is being able to know where to go, or what to learn first, and that's on the people who are educating to make that part easy :)

[@alxski6318]

Css God)

[@thought-provoker]

Not sure where the win is over what I was doing before. Literally, the CSS on my company page: --root-hue: 165; --base-hue: var(--root-hue); --contrast-hue: calc(var(--base-hue) + 180); --alternate-hue: calc(var(--base-hue) + 90); --base-color-100: hsla( var(--base-hue), 100%, 1); --base-color-90: hsla( var(--base-hue), 90%, 1); ... --contrast-color-90: hsla( var(--contrast-hue), 90%, 1); And the HTML looks like this: Hello World Click me A simple change to --root-hue recolors the entire page in a consistent way, and it will always look good.

[@AbhinavKulshreshtha]

CSS is getting more amazing. It is sad that companies are going the tailwind route.

[@hotlineoperator]

Can we also calculate margins, paddings ..

[@KevinPowell]

Yeah, you can use calc() anywhere :)

[@erics2133]

And the fun part about covering CSS based on a working draft, a new feature was added to the working draft so now the CanIUse chart looks a lot worse despite the fact that the new feature is the only thing not covered in most browsers. The new feature? You can use currentColor or a system-color as your origin color.

[@KevinPowell]

Haha, yeah, but at least nothing changed on what I showed in the video 😅

[@DmitriiBaranov-ib3kf]

Oh, I use it in TailwindCSS with --picked-color and deep/bright/neon/pastel versions of it with options to add/multiply lightness and chroma and rotate hue over oklch!

[@AvionicsDev]

css is turning into a programming language

[@fot3k]

Why does it feel like CSS is becoming more like JS. 🤔

[@hyungtaecf]

Because it needs to get emancipated from JS one day

[@MrJloa]

Bye-bye hsl, welcome color-mix! Finally

[@OJGamingYT]

Still seems cumbersome

[@sharkinahat]

Love the functionality, but the syntax ... yikes!

[@mikkolukas]

*SO* weird syntax that one have to DIVIDE by 0.5 or 50% to get half the opacity 😳 It should be MULTIPLY instead.

[@KevinPowell]

Its not dividing, the / is just a visual to separate from the color values.

[@d.l.3807]

​@@KevinPowell Could've been a pipe instead then :D

[@erickdavid4257]

@@d.l.3807 now that would be weird

[@The14Some1]

6:37 wdym except for firefox? You can clearly see it is in firefox 128 - 130. I don't understand.

[@erics2133]

127 is the current release, so unless you're running the Beta/Developer/Nightly versions, it's not out yet.

[@KevinPowell]

That's why I said, but look at that, it's coming there too. 128 isn't in public release yet

[@The14Some1]

@@erics2133 Oh that the thing. I should have checked first, my bad :)

[@The14Some1]

@@KevinPowell Right, silly me :)

[@ToniTerremoto]

It's very verbose and complicated, Sass has better tools and even solves it better, but css is on the right way

[@blazingelse9104]

Sass is not runtime though. The code ist produces is more verbose as well.

[@ToniTerremoto]

@@blazingelse9104 I don't think that's really true because CSS is clearly trying to adopt the ideas behind "preprocessors" (Sass) and why would you care about the code that Sass generates? It's just simply CSS that you have written, nothing more. Do you really look the code "bandel" that the frameworks generates? Perhaps, if you know Sass well, you can generate advanced color palettes and other styles with many useful and much simpler functions that Sass has, and use lists, maps, loops and more programming functionalities to generate a complete themes, just as the most famous CSS frameworks do, for some reason they also use Sass. It's just my opinion, I totally respect other ways of developing.

[@blazingelse9104]

@@ToniTerremoto I didn't say Sass/Scss is bad or anything. I like it for mixins for example. I Just said it's less powerful and usually more verbose for features that CSS has adopted itself. You simply cannot generate shades of a color with sass if they color itself is set at runtime. With CSS you can. With sass, you cannot calculate with relative sizes. With CSS you can. Unfortunately, CSS functions like min or max now name clash with scss functions. Scss should just drop those functions in order to stay compatible and be more useful.

[@ToniTerremoto]

@@blazingelse9104 Thanks, I totally respect your opinion and your way of developing. CSS does not have the Superpowers that Sass has, yet. For that example of the shadow in runtime that you propose, you would not have it done well only with Css (without Js) and Css clearly does not use logic to know if that shadow will be cast on a dark theme background or if it has good contrast, and that's why I think it's always a good idea to separate the "presentation" (CSS) from the "behavior" (JS, runtime), the same for the other cases that you propose, like relative measures. It's just my way of developing, those things are not useful to me. A cordial greeting. 🫂✌🏼

[@PascalHorn]

While these new color opportunities are kind of amazing, I find myself struggling using them effectively. 🫠 What I mean is: I‘m doing CSS for almost two decades now. And Hex and RGB(A) is so embedded in my mind, that I don‘t think about hsl or other stuff when it actually would make sense. At least, I‘m starting using color-mix(), though. Kevin, if you‘d like, a beginners video about all color related options would be great. 😊 (As a non-English-native speaker, I can‘t even grasp what the basic idea of hsl really means (is it hue, saturation and lightning?) And how it‘s affecting my color. While with rgb, obviously it affects the main three colors. That is my problem really. 😢)

[@ZipplyZane]

HSL is hue, saturation, lightness. Hue is the color of the rainbow. Lightness is how bright or dark the color is. And saturation is how much color the item contains. To get a feel for this, you probably should mess around with a color picker. Look up HSL color picker on Google, and play around with sliders for HSL to see how the colors change.

[@erickdavid4257]

a video explaining a little about the science behind the multiple color models in CSS would be great! there is probably others on KZbin covering this topic already