Passing a CSS variable value from the HTML into the CSS

DanielJune 9, 2020July 8, 2020

One nice trick I've discovered recently is that you can "pass" the value from the inline HTML to the CSS by having something like this:

<div style="--main-color: red;">RED</div>

div { background-color: var(--main-color); }

I've used quotes when saying to pass because we are not actually passing that variable. We are just defining an inline style for that element and we will let the cascading of the CSS do the rest.

In some scenarios, this is cool because we can define properties for some HTML elements as we would have done with something like React properties.

Of course, we can also add in the :root element a default value for the CSS var.

Below you have the full working codepen.

See the Pen
CSS Var pass value by JS Craft (@js-craft)
on CodePen.

Speaking about the CSS variables I've written some time ago a more in-depth article about them that you can read here.