This is made with (and by the author of) <css-doodle>, a web component that lets you put the CSS variant used in this blog inline into your HTML, like so:

    <script src="https://esm.sh/css-doodle/css-doodle.min.js?raw"></script>
    <css-doodle>
      @grid: 15 / 90%;
      border-radius: 50%;
      background: hsl(@t(/20), 70%, 60%);
      scale: sin(@atan2(@dx, @dy) + @ts);
    </css-doodle>

No JS needed except for loading the definition of the <css-doodle> component. Works in plain HTML, Markdown, frameworks, etc.

https://css-doodle.com/

Thanks for the explanation. I’ve moved away from frontend work in 2018, and I really have no idea what CSS can do anymore! So much of the CSS in this page looks cryptic to me.

Kudos to the author for posting something cool and new in the age of standardised styles.

css-doodle's syntax has a lot of non-standard-CSS stuff in it. All the @ things are extensions.

I wonder what is the best way to do double stroked text without using fancy Unicode characters while still displaying what the font recommends. I currently use fancy characters on [my blog](https://blog.velocifyer.com/), but that harms search results. I am in the processes of migrating my blog to 11ty (from manual HTML) and I want to improve my blog at the same time.

PS: Please give me comments on the current design of the blog.

I wonder why the firefox CSS rendering engine prefers to smooth out. Looks like a dramatically different implementation, but maybe that's just because it's an edge case of rendering

Stroke expansion is a complex topic, with more than one reasonable result (subjective preferences), and a whole lot of corner cases and incorrect answers.

Firefox has chosen to expand based on distance at all points, which is one of the reasonable answers and probably the most general one; a cusp then expands to a curve.

The others have chosen to retain cusps, which can be a reasonable answer and I believe is a lot cheaper to compute; but degenerate cases abound as you expand past the feature size (distances between nodes), so that by the fourth red ring it’s obviously incorrect.

Box shadows are another case where expansion occurs: the fourth length parameter, spread distance. If the corner is a cusp, the shadow corner will be a cusp. If it’s rounded, the shadow corner will be rounded. See https://drafts.csswg.org/css-backgrounds/#shadow-shape for some helpful diagrams. A sneaky trick: .1px border-radius means the box still looks square, but the expanded shadow will curve. Sometimes useful. But back on the original content of the article—if you use a font with microscopic curves instead of cusp nodes, Chromium/Safari will look more like Firefox.

While I don't entirely love the rounding effect of firefox, I feel Chrome interpretation is just wrong in creating spurious spikes. Intuitively for the asterisk shape I'd expect the outline to go towards a plain hexagon, something that neither browser accomplishes.

The Firefox one looks like exactly what you’d expect from stepping the result of a SDF for that character. The rounded corners of the first layer would all be equidistant from the nearest corner of the original character.

Miter join (Safari) VS round join (Chrome)

firefox looks like an SDF (shortest distance to the object), I'm not sure what the chrome one is...

I would assume they are just drawing the outline, not performing any distance calculations, and the differences are just a result of different linejoin choices. [1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/fill-stroke-3/#stroke-linejoin

I'd imagine that at some point during the text rendering process, they have to generate an SDF of the text they want to render (it's what I did when I wanted to manually render text anyway). If they do, then they can generate the extra text-width lines basically for free, just fill everything with distance less than the property.

I may be entirely wrong though, I don't know in detail how browsers render stuff

I think Firefox applies more aggressive subpixel rendering and path smoothing before stroking. It resamples the glyph outline path at a higher precision level before handing it to the stroke algorithm.

Look at V in Love. It looks like bug in Chrome.

I just found out about https://css-doodle.com after reading that. A few months back, I was doing similar things with the HTML Canvas API. I didn’t know I could do these kinds of fun little things with CSS as well. Love that.

OT: really love the design of this blog. Simple, clear and content first.

Ya! So many posts with clear presentations of css/svg/canvas.

The Daily Sketch series or 'CSS Animation with offset-path' are equally fun.

First thing I thought to do was add an emoji to the content. But it just shows the unknown char rectangle. I was hoping for magic, I guess.

It works if you use Noto Emoji as the font.

When I modified your fiddle to use the Apple logo and colors, the first ring is eating part of the apple. The top of the apple is cut off. Any idea why that is?

      --c: #5EBD3E,#FFB900,#F78200,#E23838,#973999,#009CDF;
      @content: '';

Neat! It's unfortunate that the rendering is so different between browsers.

Have you tried the same thing with shadows? They can also be stacked, I believe.

Shadows have to be spread in a circle to achieve an outline, so the general shape will converge to roughly a circle, barely following the shape of the text.

Eat your heart out Adobe Flash.

This is so freaking cool

What's up with the bot accounts that just vaguely describe the article? Is it for karma farming accounts to sell on? I'm not opposed to bot accounts inherently but the stuff they so often post is just mind numbing to encounter, it feels like a little bit of my life has been stolen every time I get to the end of such a paragraph.

Why are you not opposed to bot accounts? It is a terrible thing. People come here to read other people.

Look up “generative engine optimization”

People should quit trying to make CSS a drawing tool--it is not--and start learning how to use SVG instead or images.

Art is often made from clever use of things that were not intended to make art. Let them have fun.

Too late: https://codepen.io/jaysalvat/pen/kazzOj

A robust rebuttal. It’s how i prefer all of my images

The article literally says "it's not well-suited for production usage" so I don't really see the reason for the objection here. It's an experiment.

If you have a lot of "images" with such effects to generate from dynamic text, using SVG makes no sense, is vastly more complex and less flexible than the solution here.

You don't generate images, you just embed SVG nodes in the DOM. From the browser's perspective SVG and HTML elements are just two different types of element.

SVG is not great for text - HTML has more features - but for display text it's OK.

I'd send you the link to the person who made a 3d renderer in pure CSS, with a very slow render of lara croft, but Cohost shut down

I would think that quite a few powerful new ideas have come purely from abusing and bashing around older ideas.

It is pretty much the entire hacker ethos. "I have this thing that does something but not what I need, but with some tinkering it now does what I need" or even "I have this thing, but I'm just going to see what else I can make it do whether it is useful or not but solely because I can"

Probably writing itself was originally a hack.

This could actually be cool for display text like a headline. I don’t think that’s only for images.