The amazing powers of CSS

Jun 19, 2012 — Updated Feb 9, 2019

Yesterday at the office, we were coming up with strange and magical CSS tricks. Take this one for instance, it makes empty links very visible:

a[href = ""] {
    background: red;
    color: white;
    font-size: x-large;
}

Check out the live example at jsFiddle

You can also style absolute links differently from relative links:

a[href ^= http] {
    display: inline-block;
    color: red;
    transform: rotate(180deg);
}

Check out the live example at jsFiddle

If you want to have a different style for links pointing out of your domain, you can use the :not() selector. This is actually how we do the little arrows next to external links at HTML5Rocks.

a[href ^= 'http']:not([href *= 'html5rocks.']) {
    background: transparent url(arrow.png) no-repeat center right;
    padding-right: 16px;
}

Check out the live example at jsFiddle

Just to remind you that you're not limited to styling links, here's how to make all PNG images inverted:

img[src $= .png] {
    filter: invert(100%);
}

Moving on from attribute selectors, did you know that you can make the document head visible, along with the other elements there?

head {
    display: block;
    border-bottom: 5px solid red;
}
script, style, link {
    display: block;
    white-space: pre;
    font-family: monospace;
}

Or that you can use the awesome power of CSS attr-function to fill in the :after and :before content?

script:before {
    content: "<script src=\"" attr(src) "\" type=\"" attr(type) "\">";
}
script:after {
    content: "</script>";
}

style:before {
    content: "<style type=\"" attr(type) "\">";
}
style:after {
    content: "< /style>";
}

/* And for a finish, <link> */
link:before {
    content: "<link rel=\"" attr(rel) "\" type=\"" attr(type) "\" href=\"" attr(href) "\" />";
}

Check out the live example at jsFiddle

Note that attr() reads in the attribute values of the matching element, so if you use it for #foo:before, it reads the attributes from #foo.

Last updated

Feb 9, 2019 — Improve article

Return to all articles