Book of dark arts: selective disclosure with CSS

Show and hide pages and page elements with declarative CSS instead of imperative code

Unjam CSS

Abstract: Unjam CSS is a technique for removing render-blocking CSS from pages over which we have only partial control, such as CMS or portals. The problem: a portal generates HTML pages based on a template. Custom HTML can be inserted at specific place holders, but we can't modify the rest of the page HTML. The … Continue reading Unjam CSS →

Equal height HTML elements in a container with CSS

Task: create HTML elements that contain other elements and adjust their height to surrounding container. No Javascript allowed. That's surprisingly hard; height:100% won't work; elements generally wrap their contents tightly and don't extend to their parents height dimension. Illustrating the problem: three elements inside a surrounding container Css-tricks lists several ways [1] to get this … Continue reading Equal height HTML elements in a container with CSS →

Advanced web security topics

(Updated 22 May 2020) This post discusses web security issues that I come across - so far thankfully mostly by reading about them. It is a work in progress which I'll keep updating. The post title includes "advanced" because the topics discussed here involve clever, non-trivial hacks, are novel at the time of their publication … Continue reading Advanced web security topics →

Internet Explorer: Disabling clicks on a page

Disabling clicks on a webpage should be easy: put a div in front of it with a fixed position which should get all clicks. With IE that is not easy because a completely transparent element will forward clicks to the underlying element. Some solutions I found: Alpha filter with background Adding these CSS properties (IE8 … Continue reading Internet Explorer: Disabling clicks on a page →