An informal survey of z-index values found in the wild

With css scripting languages becoming a core part of the build set up I'm amazed how many people still use 100 / 1000 / 10000 / 999 style z-index values.

https://gist.github.com/davidweatherall/dfc469b7a4451b169ae5... Is my go to sass function for creating a simple to use z-index map.

This was fascinating, thanks. Made me think about why I used 99 as my max -- I think it's because back in the SNES days, all the RPGs used 99 as a limit.

Note: The following statements are for sake of argument and I realize that they are likely not practical.

I think is a result of the fact that styling is outside the domain of front-end software engineering. I don't mean this literally; clearly it is part of the job description. What I mean is that as a software engineer my primary skillset is in programming and CSS generally has very little to do with programming.

This is true semantically (CSS lacks good support for variables, functions, conditionals, etc.). However, it is also true in terms of of how designs are generally structured. For example, layout tends to be "I want exactly this spacing at this breakpoint and this spacing at this other breakpoint" instead of "I want the spacing to scale according to this equation of screen size".

9. lol keep trying. 99. Doesn't work. 99999. Breaks modal.

...

9999. Ahhhh....Just right.

> At rank 39, we have 8675309, which I personally didn’t recognize as being particularly noteworthy. However, with over half a million collected uses, it clearly is meaningful to many.

Is this value there due to some stock value in some well used piece of software such as a cookie notice plugin for Wordpress?

I had not realised this was a '42' grade special number before and I wonder how it is so popular in CSS.

I would have liked to see the first graph in number order instead of rank. Being in rank order doesn't tell me much. Later is the graph with all numbers in number order, but I think that first graph with just the top 50 would be far more interesting in number order.

Amazing job you did there. That's oddly interesting to measure a data we use without common convention, it really draws out the human tendency of picking up a number.

Would be interesting to know the selector grouping count as well, I would assume most would be for things like '.overlay' or '.dropdown' etc

I’m impressed by the author’s crawling of 112 million webpages, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s really necessary. Surely the same distribution could be found with a smaller sample?

The story about 8675309 is pretty interesting, but I prefer 6345789.

Really disappointed that 9001 did not make the list. :)

From the article :

> Perhaps you will succeed where I failed, and find a way to include in a chart the largest z-index value I found, namely 10^1242-1.

> Yes, that’s 1242 times the number 9.

Come on, I know maths are no longer needed to be a developer, but this is ridiculous.