So what I'm trying to do is map each character of a string to a span. With each span, I'm using inline styles in order to dynamically change the y position of the character based on the current position in the string. I then take this span string and add it to a variable which in the end will contain all of the characters converted to spans, and then output this into the DOM using innerHTML.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
<title>Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<p id="output"></p>
</body>
<script>
const text = "the dog jumped over the fence";
let output = "";
let i = 0;
for (char of text) {
output += `<span style="transform: translateY(${i}px)">${char}</span>`;
i += 1;
}
document.querySelector("#output").innerHTML = output;
</script>
<style>
body {
background-color: black;
}
span {
color: green;
}
</style>
</html>
However, none of my styles that have to do with transform are being applied externally. I've checked the developer console and the spans do indeed have the styles that I wanted, but they're not being applied on the actual page. [1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/MoDnq.png
The strange thing is this only seems to be happening for the transform CSS property. When I edit the font size for each span using the current position, I get the expected output.
/* When I change the for loop to adjust the font size instead of using transform */
for (char of text) {
output += `<span style="font-size: ${i}px">${char}</span>`;
i += 1;
}
this is what I get: [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/0dk21.png
When you attempt to translate the span elements vertically, you don't see a change because of how inline elements work in HTML.
If you want to apply a translation to the spans, you need to first change their display style to inline-block, which will let you apply a transformation to them while keeping them in the same line.
#output span { display: inline-block; }
From the w3 css wiki:
transformable element
A transformable element is an element in one of these categories:
all elements whose layout is governed by the CSS box model except for non-replaced inline boxes, table-column boxes, and table-column-group boxes [CSS2]
all SVG paint server elements, the clipPath element and SVG renderable elements with the exception of any descendant element of text content elements [SVG2]
CSS Transform only works on block element. Change your span into a block element.
span {
display: inline-block;
color: green;
}