Who knows?

I love it when I come across some bit of CSS I’ve never heard of before.

Take this article on the text-emphasis property.

“The what property?”, I hear you ask. That was my reaction too. But look, it’s totally a thing.

Or take this article by David Bushell called CSS Button Styles You Might Not Know.

Sure enough, halfway through the article David starts talking about styling the button in an input type="file” using the ::file-selector-button pseudo-element:

All modern browsers support it. I had no idea myself until recently.

He’s right!

Then I remembered that I’ve got a file upload input in the form I use for posting my notes here on adactio.com (in case I want to add a photo). I immediately opened up my style sheet, eager to use this new-to-me bit of CSS.

I found the bit where I style buttons and this is the selector I saw:

button,
input[type="submit"],
::file-selector-button

Huh. I guess I did know about that pseudo-element after all. Clearly the knowledge exited my brain shortly afterwards.

There’s that tautological cryptic saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” But I don’t even know what I do know!

Responses

Beedge

@baldur this happens to me in my job as a developer on a daily basis but on a much larger scale. I have added whole features to my services or apps and then completely forgotten them, to the point that I’ll go to add a cool new bit of functionality only to see it sitting there waiting for me to discover. A gift from my younger self.

# Posted by Beedge on Wednesday, March 27th, 2024 at 10:31am

adamrice

@adactio @Meyerweb The “text-emphasis” property reproduces a customary part of Japanese typesetting. I always wind up reading this kind of dotted text like. There. Is. A. Period. After. Every. Word. Japanese typesetters historically didn’t have access to as many fonts, or font weights and variants, so they pull out all the stops with other types of decoration.

# Posted by adamrice on Thursday, March 28th, 2024 at 3:41pm

adamrice

@adactio @Meyerweb Also, that dotted text looks really weird with a proportional font. Japanese text is always monospaced.

# Posted by adamrice on Thursday, March 28th, 2024 at 3:43pm

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