How to Discover a CSS Trick
July 30, 2025
Do we invent or discover CSS tricks? Michelangelo described his sculpting process as chiseling away superfluous material to reveal the sculpture hidden inside the marble, and Stephen King says his ideas are pre-existing things he locates and uncovers “like fossils in the ground.” Paragraph one is early for me to get pretentious enough to liken myself to those iconic creative forces, but my work on CSS-Tricks feels like “discovering,” not “inventing,” secret synergies between CSS features, which have been eyeing each other from disparate sections of the MDN web docs and patiently waiting for someone to let them dance together in front of the world.
Douglas Crockford, of JSON fame, says he didn’t invent JSON, he discovered it. Over the years many unintended uses of CSS have been uncovered-like the decades long approach of using float to create page layouts.
This great article by Lee Meyer explores how to think about CSS to discover novel uses and capabilities hidden perhaps even in 20 year old features.
