Alvaro Montoro

Posted on Oct 3, 2022 • Edited on Dec 21, 2022 • Originally published at alvaromontoro.com

CSS-Only Reading Position Indicator

#css #html #webdev

You may have noticed those reading progress indicators on top of some pages (mainly news articles and blog posts). They are a bar that grows as you read the article and lets you know how much you have left to read visually. This component is a nice feature, especially on mobile, where the scrollbars are not always visible. But did you know that you can code a reading indicator with just a single HTML element and some CSS? No JavaScript code at all.

In this post, I will explain how to build a reading indicator in CSS. You can check the source code on this CodePen demo:

The Code

First, you will need only one empty HTML element:

<div class="reading-indicator"></div>

This tag goes at the page's root (using absolute positioning to get the document's height), and then we will use the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements to "draw" the progress bar.

Note: We could create a more straightforward reading progress indicator without an explicit element, directly in the <body> with its ::before and ::after... but, call me old-fashioned, I prefer not to have "unexpected side-effects," so I like to create an element for it.

The style for the reading-indicator class will be as follows:

.reading-progress {
   position: absolute;
   top: 0;
   left: 0;
   width: 100%;
   height: calc(100% - 100vh);
   z-index: -1;
   overflow: hidden;
}

A couple of important things related to this code:

The height is a funky value; why is that? Why not just 100%? Using 100% would take the page's full size, making the reading indicator stop progressing before reaching 100% (because the 100% would be the exact bottom of the page). We need to consider the height of the view frame (100vh) and refactor it into the element's height.
overflow: hidden would not be required, but as you may have noticed, the indicator edge is diagonal instead of vertical, so after reaching 100%, the whole bar wouldn't take the full width. To fix that, I make the pseudo-elements a bit wider than their container and use the overflow: hidden to avoid unnecessary horizontal scroll bars.

This element is only the container. What draws the reading indicator is the pseudo-elements: with ::before, we will draw a horizontal bar that occupies the whole width and has a height and sticks to the top of the page:

.reading-progress::before {
   content: "";
   position: fixed;
   top: 0;
   left: -0.5%;
   width: 101%;
   height: 10px;
   background: linear-gradient(90deg, #369, #396);
}

But with this, we just have a horizontal line. So how do we make it grow and shrink as the user scrolls around? That's where the trickery begins. We use the ::after pseudo-element that occupies the whole size of the parent and a diagonal background, one half the color of the background (notice this as it will be a problem later) and the other half transparent:

.reading-progress::after {
   content: "";
   position: absolute;
   top: 0;
   left: -0.5%;
   width: 101%;
   height: 100%;
   background: linear-gradient(to bottom left, #fff 50%, #fff0 50%);
}

And one last (but crucial) style change: we need to make the html tag have a relative position, so its height impacts the reading indicator.

html {
   position: relative;
}

That's it. That's the trick: the ::after pseudo-element covers completely the ::before, but as we scroll on the page and progress on the triangular background, we reveal more and more of the bar (remember it has a fixed position so that one is always visible).

Some Thoughts

This way of creating a reading indicator is not perfect; it has some interesting points and also some drawbacks. Here is a short list of pros and cons:

Pros:

Simple to code and develop.
Responsive (relative units FTW!)
Supported by all browsers.

Cons:

It requires a flat background.
Not visually appealing (the end is tilted)
It only works at the page level

With some tweaking, it may work at the article level. But with the current implementation, it is more of a glorified scrollbar indicator than any other thing. Which doesn't mean it is not practical. As mentioned above, it could be engaging in some scenarios, especially on cell phones or tablets.

I did some unsuccessful tests, but I still think there has to be a different way to do it (maybe using sticky and background-attachment?)