Welcome to the first Links For You of 2025. I'm currently writing this from, I kid you not, the Danube in Austria. My wife and I are a bit over halfway through a European vacation (one we planned before Adobe decided to give me an early Christmas gift of a layoff). So far, it's been absolutely glorious, and I plan on writing about the experience later this month. On with the links!
CSS Light and Dark Themes Made Easy
First up is the wonderfully named, "Come to the light-dark() Side", by Sara Joy. This looks at how native CSS can make light and dark themes incredibly easy to implement. I had no clue it was so easy to implement in CSS, but as I've said before, CSS has improved so much over the years it feels impossible to keep up with all the features. Sara's article discusses how to tap into the user's native OS settings via CSS and has plenty of easy to understand examples.
Linking with Text Fragments
For a while now I've seen sites making use of text fragments - links with embedded "highlight this part when you load" bits. But I never really took the time to actually look into the specification. This post by Ahmad Alfy does a great job explaining the syntax for the links and demonstrates all the various ways you can use it. As an example, the link below will load his article and highlight the first subheading:
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Why not end our list of links with something super depressing, but sadly, probably pretty accurate. My buddy Brian Rinaldi shares his predictions for 2025 over on his personal blog and I can pretty much say I think he's 100% accurate. It may be my own current state of mind, but I don't think this is going to be a great year for us in tech, or outside of tech either. I would be incredibly happy though if Brian and I were wrong.
Just For Fun
How about a little snow in your web pages? Zach Leatherman provides you a solution with the simple <snow-fall> web component as shown below:
You can read more about it here: https://www.zachleat.com/web/snow-fall/