"As CSS patterns go these days this one is delightfully low-tech, but in my work I've seen it have an outsized impact in ensuring usable experiences for increasingly-heavy websites when network or device conditions aren't ideal. This notion of delivering "optimistically" while planning for failure is something I've written about before, but the set-it-and-forget-it nature of this latest stab at it makes it my favorite yet."
"that commonly occurs with Web Components, when developers hide custom elements until they are "defined" by their JavaScript. That's an anti-pattern I covered in my Web Components course, and it's common because it aims to work around a very real issue: often, we don't want our users to see a component until it's "ready." That (anti)-pattern looks like this: :not(:defined) { visibility: hidden; }"
Self-Destructing CSS is a defensive CSS pattern that delivers styles optimistically and removes or disables them if resources fail, improving usability on slow networks or constrained devices. The approach favors a set-it-and-forget-it mechanism that trades immediate styling for robustness, akin to graceful degradation and Progressive Enhancement. A related problem arises with Web Components when developers hide custom elements until scripts define them, commonly using :not(:defined) { visibility: hidden; }. The :defined pseudo-class matches custom elements after customElements.define runs, and hiding elements until definition can create an anti-pattern that prevents content visibility when JavaScript fails or loads slowly.
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