CSS properties you should know for better text designs

ibobev 100 points 11 comments August 11, 2026
master.dev · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

searchstefano

CSS has come a long way. On several sites I’ve been able to completely remove JS for things like popups, mobile menus, and open/close interactions. The fact that modern CSS and native browser APIs can handle so much of this makes the web feel simpler and more capable at the same time.

sixtyj

I always tell myself that I should use backwards-compatible CSS only. I vividly remember IE and many hacks to have css elements properly working in it… Imho this is a reason why markdown and other rich-textual formats appeared. Btw is there a some “w3schools” for recent CSS?

addedlovely

Was expecting to see text-wrap:balance there. Solve away your orphans! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

myfonj

Some caveats worth mentioning yet missing there: 1. many, MANY implementation bugs in `background-clip: text` across browsers, especially Firefox [1], basically safe only for simple cases with no additional transforms or filters. 2. `color: transparent` ensures the text will be invisible in every browser that does supports the `transparent` keyword (i.e. basically every single one, presumably) but not support background-clip:text yet, or fail to load or interpret the background-image (like in high contrast/forced colours mode). Use `-webit-text-fill-color: transparent` instead. (Yes, that vendor prefix is necessary, and yes, it is de-facto standardised and implemented in Chrome and Firefox [2]. And yes, it is as absurd as it gets.) 3. Touching the `letter-spacing` turns off all ligatures, logically. Could be a good thing, actually, but worth knowing. (Anthropic used to use negative letter-spacing thorough its webpages, but now it seems they abandoned that.) [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1656784 [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

montroser

I think their heading `box-decoration-mode` is actually meant to be `box-decoration-break`. That's the real property that exists, and is documented on MDN. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

vivzkestrel

- for a website that talks a lot about web, css your pagination is broken - did you know that https://master.dev/blog/page/65/ onwards till page 70 there is not a single article on any of your pages and yet the pagination keeps going to older posts? - practise what you preach maybe?

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