Writing

There’s a well-established ‘best practice’ that CSS authors (as well as linters and minifiers) should remove units from any 0 value. It’s a fine rule in most cases, but there are a few common situations where it will break your code.

Erin and I spent a couple days last week at the Colorado Shoe School in Bellvue, CO – learning, designing, and making our own sneakers. Yes, actual sneakers, fit for wearing, and built from scratch. Only the soles come pre-formed out of recycled plastic.

All browsers add an 8px margin on the body element – it’s part of the w3c-recommended default stylesheet which browsers generally use as a starting point for their own ‘user agent’ styles. But why 8px? Where does that come from?

There’s a new web API proposal for transitioning shared-elements across pages. It’s great for making smooth page transitions, but what if we apply it to individual elements with changing styles on a single page?

Working on Sass support for color spaces, I ran into a question about the proper handling of hwb() colors. That lead me down a rabbit hole, exploring the edges of hwb (and powerless color channels) in CSS.

This post has been written and published, and filed away for safe keeping as an event that happened in my past. This post is also a live performance, and an invitation to engage. Thanks for dropping by.

In CSS, there are compound selectors and also complex selectors, and I never remember which is which. Do you need to learn the difference? Probably not. But I’m tired of looking it up.

Reflections on making theater, and my family reacting to it.

What does it mean to be a person – to have a body, and live in it – to make choices, and change over time – to tell the truth?

Cascade layers are a new CSS feature that allows us to define explicit contained layers of specificity.

A monkey hitting keys at random for an infinite amount of time will eventually want some help writing Hamlet (or whatever). You’re the monkey. We’re here to help.

Working on a new CSS feature like Container Queries, one of the most important considerations is to ensure a “migration path” – a way for developers to start integrating the new code, without breaking their sites on legacy browsers.

Media-queries allow an author to make style changes based on the overall viewport dimensions – but in many cases, authors would prefer styling modular components based on their context within a layout.

“What is one thing you learned about building websites this year?”

As I spend more of my time working on the CSS language, I wanted a place to take notes and explore new ideas in the open.

CSS Custom Properties allow us to manage and control both cascade and inheritance in new ways.

I wrote this at the start of the Iraq war (2003), and later made the short film. It’s been on my mind again during COVID-19 isolation.

“What about building websites has you interested this year?”

Firefox 69 was the first to implement selector feature queries, but other browsers are following suit. I’ll show you how it works, and how to start using this new feature query right away.

Horizontal text overflow has always been difficult to manage on the web. The default visible overflow is designed to make sure content remains accessible no matter the size of a containing box, but it’s not our only option.

Why waste your time on half-measures? Make your site THE MOST NORMALEST with this ULTIMATE CSS RESET.

When we’re scrolling down a page, or through a gallery of images, snap-targets can help guide us from one section or image to the next. In the past, developers have used JavaScript to hijack scrolling, but now we can manage scroll alignment directly in CSS with only a few lines of code.

The display property has been in CSS from the beginning, handling everything from block and inline boxes to list-items and full layout systems like flexbox or grid. Now the display syntax is getting an upgrade to match it’s multiple uses.

There are a number of property & value combinations that can lead to CSS being inactive, and now Firefox will tell you why. Open the developer tools, and look for the greyed-out property with an info-box on hover.

It’s a common pattern to align form labels and inputs in grid-like layout. I’ll show you how to do it quickly using CSS subgrid, with several quick fallbacks.

Card layouts are popular on the web, rows and columns of boxes with similar content. CSS grids can help align those cards, but it’s still be hard to line-up content inside the cards – headers and footers that might need more or less room.

For years, we’ve struggled to build resilient layouts on the web, but CSS Grid promises to change all that – and you can start using it now, with only a few properties and basic concepts.

I’ve often used initial and unset in my CSS – global keywords that can be applied to any property. The difference is small, but important: unset allows inheritance, while initial does not. But then Firefox implemented revert and I was confused – how is this one different from the others?!

Sass recently launched a new module system. The new syntax will replace @import with @use and @forward – a big step forward for making Sass partials more readable, performant, and safe.

Love it or hate it, CSS is weird: not quite markup, not quite programming in the imperative sense, and nothing like the design programs we use for print. How did we get here?

When you create lists in HTML, browsers add bullet-points or numbers we call list markers. Now CSS gives us the tools to style those list markers, and even create our own!

In the CSS naming-convention arms race to lowest specificity, I’ve decided to only use universal * selectors. I call it F*CSS.

I’ve been working with Mozilla to help create a new resource for web professionals – with a mix of videos, articles, demos, and open source tools.

Pushing past the “variable” metaphor, CSS Custom Properties can provide new ways to balance context and isolation in our patterns and components.

A reflection on change, desire, choice, and the stories we tell about ourselves

Script for My Body, My Gender rogue Vagina Monologue.

I was invited to perform a Vagina Monologue, and ended up writing my own.

The Journal of Mennonite Writing asked me to submit for their queer issue. I don’t identify as Mennonite, but I did grow up in the church, so I asked my friends what to write about. They suggested the common question: In a world without rigid gender roles, would anyone need to be trans?

Yesterday, I shared an article about my impending surgery, and a request for help – both social and financial – as I go through this. I was embarrassed to ask, and not sure what to expect, but your response has been swift and overwhelming. I can’t thank you enough, but I’ll keep trying.

Denver Health has started offering vaginoplasty in addition to their other trans medical services. While I’ve been on the waitlist for various surgeons around the country, Denver Health called me this week to give me a date: September 10, less than two months away.

An LGBT concert of writers and composers by the Playground Ensemble, with three works by LGBT authors and the composers.

A queer adaptation of the classic novel

We are not here to flatter egotism, or prop up humbug; we are merely telling the [queer] story. We value what is good in the book; but we believe in the existence of other, and more vivid kinds of goodness.

“I don’t have many guy friends, but my guitarist is one. Parting, I lean in for the cheek-kiss but he plants a good one right on my lips.”

I used exerpts from Body & Gender Fragments to talk about the contradictions of transition – a sort of “crossing over” without going anywhere.

Inspired by Robin Rendle, I demonstrate some of my early experiments combining CSS Grids and custom properties to create dynamic layouts and data-visualizations.

At the family vacation in Moab, everyone is doing their best. It’s not enough, and my day is peppered with the wrong name and pronouns. I hide in my room through dinner so they won’t see me crying.

“I’ve seen myself in the mirror. I find me… disorienting. What do they see that I don’t? Why aren’t they laughing at me?”

“Mother finds me at her wardrobe, in her pumps and pearls. What are you doing? Being a mommy. Are you, then? She clips on the earrings (they pinch!), reaches for her lipstick.”

A reflection on the nature and value of productivity for the SuperYesMore series: The Human in the Machine.

Viewport units have been around for several years now, with near-perfect support in the major browsers, but I keep finding new and exciting ways to use them. I thought it would be fun to review the basics, and then round-up some of my favorite use-cases.

I wasn’t born in the wrong body. I was born, a body. Without my body, I don’t exist.

It feels like CSS Grid has been coming for a long time now, but it just now seems to be reaching a point where folks are talking more and more about it and that it’s becoming something we should learning.

My friend Maureen Maloney asked to document my reaction to the 2016 election, as part of the America Heard film series.

The Denver Quarterly vol 51 no 2 features side-by-side excerpts from Riding SideSaddle*, and Buntport’s adaptation: 10 Myths on the Proper Application of Beauty Products.

I’m still reeling from this year of insults,  a traumatizing campaign turned traumatic election. I’m not sad about a contest lost, but what those results mean for real people around me. 2016 is over, but 2017 is going to be even harder.

There’s a lot of language that gets thrown around, but much of it comes loaded with over-simplified baggage and misconceptions. Here are a few that have been on my mind – from gender identity to biological sex, transition, passing, and visibility.

It’s been a month since our country pseudo-elected a bigoted blow-hard for president. I’m heading to DC to protest his inauguration in January, visit friends, and go on a mixed-media resistance tour…

No matter what acronym drives your selectors (BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, ETC), loops can help keep your patterns more readable and maintainable, baking them directly into your code. We’ll take a look at what loops can do, and how to use them in the major CSS preprocessors.

Blog for people who make websites

Chris Coyier interviews Miriam when she joins the CSS Tricks team as a Staff Writer. We talk about gettting started in the industry, name confusion, fouding OddBird, building Susy, and more.

There are some questions that come up again and again if you are trans. A few of those questions are terrible, but most of them are well-intentioned. I’m lucky to have a supportive community around me, so I thought I’d write down my most common answers to help ease your stress about getting it right, and ease my stress about answering the same questions over and over.

Award-winning stage adaptation of Riding SideSaddle*, weaving myth with everyday ritual

Using Sass, you can write your stylesheets in a more concise, dynamic, and readable way, and cut down many of the repetitive tasks that come with writing vanilla CSS. This book provides a thorough introduction to Sass for the beginner. Co-writen with my friend Kitty Giraudel.

A stage adaptation of my novel, Riding SideSaddle*, created with Buntport Theater and Teacup Gorilla.

This interview serves as a follow up to my performance of The Obsolete Book in a Post-Obsolete World as Represented by a Post-Obsolete Book About Dance at the Media Archeology Lab.

Riding SideSaddle* has gone vertical – all 250 cards displayed in a gallery show.

A joint tour for Teacup Gorilla’s debut album The Holes They Leave, and my debut novel Riding SideSaddle*.

An interview with the insightful Ryo Yamaguchi at Michigan Quarterly Review.

A fragmented memory of friendship – navigating fluid genders, relationships, and bodies that resist order, category, or completion. Inspired by Margaret Clap, and the many myths of Hermaphroditus.

An artist residency at the Media Archeology Lab, working on development of The Post-Obsolete Book.

Part 7 of Fuck the Muse

Part 6 of Fuck the Muse

Part 5 of Fuck the Muse

Part 4 of Fuck the Muse

Part 3 of Fuck the Muse

Part 2 of Fuck the Muse

a series of articles on creative process

Collaboration doesn’t have to be a social activity. Successful collaboration is knowing when to bring people together and when to send them home with individual assignments.

An archival rhizome ecology in ten parts, and a reflection on the obsolescence of obsolescence – documented on the cloud, and open-sourced as a defense against post-post-obsolescence.

Studied writing and performance with E. Tracy Grinnell, Michelle Ellsworth, and Caroline Bergvall – resulting in early drafts of The Post-Obsolete Book and Riding SideSaddle*.

A novel about new love, moving apart, and what comes next. A love story, and an after-love story – told wiith poetry and pictures.

Thanks to Chuck Mee for some borrowed words…

A modern, theatrical interpretation of the Catholic Mass – created by Grapefruit Lab and Teacup Gorilla.

Combining the sacrifice, transcendence, blood, and circumstance of the Catholic Mass with history, live music, science, dance, literature, and pop culture to find a wholly modern communion experience. What we have left is our selves, broken and battered, but surviving together.

Teacup Gorilla inhabits the venues of Denver, CO with dark indie-rock soundscapes and evocative poetry – often compared to early Modest Mouse, Explosions in the Sky, or the Velvet Underground.

We want to make art without assumptions – art that humanizes and entertains and challenges and brings people into conversation.

An action comedy for the stage, based on our favorite movie tropes. The script was devised by the entire ensemble, lead by Michelle Milne, Miriam, Emily Swora, and Ben Jacobs. I don’t believe this is the final script…

a ten minute play, and short film

We hurt ourselves for love…

My first one-act play…

a play in one act, and a short film

Reflections of a Mennonite holocaust survivor after the war

Based on a series of interviews with Annie in 2003, this play was produced first by Goshen College as a runner-up for the International Peace Play Contest, and then in collabiration with New World Arts for my senior thesis production.

a glimpse of the aftermath

I worked as Master Electrician of the college theater and music performance venues, while I studied theater, writing, and visual art.