Sharing data between CSS and JavaScript using custom properties

#css #javascript #interaction

One of the big battles we see in the web development world is still CSS vs. JavaScript. Both have their merits, their own syntax and ideas and it can be tough to get your head around them.

This is why I love that we have ways to make the two communicate and use each for what it is best at. For one thing, I always found it annoying to manipulate the styles object of a DOM element. It meant accessing the element and setting the various style properties. In the end, it resulted in an inline style attribute you'd never write by hand.

A much cleaner way to me is to use CSS custom properties. These are commonly called "CSS variables" and you define them in CSS using the -- syntax.

:root {
  --pagebackground: powderblue;
}
body {
  background: var(--pagebackground);
}

Being "variables", you can re-use them throughout your styles document.

The fun begins when you use JavaScript to manipulate them. In the case of this example, the CSS custom property is set on the root element of the document. So you can read it with JavaScript using the following.

let bg = getComputedStyle(document.documentElement).
  getPropertyValue('--pagebackground');

And you can set it with JavaScript by accessing the style of the root element (or any other element with custom properties) and setting a property.

document.documentElement.style.
  setProperty('--pagebackground', 'firebrick');

You can try this live on codepen:

The great thing about that is that you can use the power of JavaScript to give CSS things it can't access. For example, CSS can't read the coordinate of the mouse cursor, but JavaScript can.

In our CSS, we can define two properties as 0:

:root {
  --mouse-x: 0;
  --mouse-y: 0;
}

And in JavaScript, we add a mousemove handler to the document and manipulate these two properties:

let root =  document.documentElement;
document.addEventListener('mousemove', e => {
  root.style.setProperty('--mouse-x', e.x);
  root.style.setProperty('--mouse-y', e.y);
},{passive: true});

And that's all the JavaScript we need. As CSS custom properties are live and change their value, we can now, for example, show a circle where he mouse cursor is in CSS using the following.

Our HTML:

<div id="ball"></div>

The CSS:

:root {
  --mouse-x: 0;
  --mouse-y: 0;
}
#ball {
 width: 20px;
 height: 20px;
 background: white;
 border-radius: 100%; 
 transform: translate(
   calc(calc(var(--mouse-x) - 10) * 1px), 
   calc(calc(var(--mouse-y) - 10) * 1px)
 );
}

Some information on the CSS here:

We set the width and height of the ball div to 20 pixels and the background to white.
Adding a border-radius of 100% makes sure we get a circle and not a square.
We then use transform: translate to position the circle on the screen. This could be something like transform:translate(200px, 300px) to position our ball at 200 pixels horizontal and 300 pixels vertical.
As JavaScript sets the CSS custom property to a numeric value, we need to convert it to pixels by multiplying it with 1px.
And as the ball is 20 pixels big, we can't just place it at --mouse-x and --mouse-y but we need to subtract 10 from it to centre it on the cursor.

This trick allows us to do complex calculations, read out browser state and interaction state in JavaScript and still keep all the look and feel in CSS. To me, that's a win.

If you want to see it in action, you can try this codepen. I also added a background effect to show how you can re-use the mouse x and y data: