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Flash’s Web Tech Legacy
11.1.2021
Tiffany B. Brown on how Flash paved the way for some things we might think of as fairly modern web technologies:
Flash wasn’t just good for playing multimedia. It was also good for manipulating it. Using ActionScript, you could pan
…
The post Flash’s Web Tech Legacy...
Styling Code In and Out of Blocks
6.1.2021
There is a <code> tag in HTML. I literally just used it to wrap that tag in the previous sentence — so meta. It is an inline-by-default element that denotes any sort of code. It has default (user agent) styles …
The post Styling Code In and Out of Blocks appeared first...
Whack-a-Mole: The CSS Edition
6.1.2021
We’ve seen the checkbox hack and how it can be used to build a complete state machine in CSS. Today, we’ll take that line of thought a step further and build a simple game of Whack-A-Mole, where the player needs …
The post Whack-a-Mole: The CSS Edition appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
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Accessible SVG Icons
28.12.2020
The answer to “What is the most accessible HTML for an SVG icon?” isn’t one-size-fits all, because what an icon needs to do on a website varies. I’m partial to Heather Migliorisi’s research on all this, but I can summarize.…
The post Accessible SVG Icons...
clipPath vs. mask
27.12.2020
These things are so similar, I find it hard to keep them straight. This is a nice little explanation from viewBox (what a cool name and URL, I hope they keep it up).
The big thing is that clipPath (the element in SVG, as well as clip-path in CSS) is vector and when it is applied, whatever you...
Custom Styles in GitHub Readme Files
23.12.2020
Even though GitHub Readme files (typically ./readme.md) are Markdown, and although Markdown supports HTML, you can’t put <style> or <script> tags init. (Well, you can, they just get stripped.) So you can’t apply custom styles there. Or can you?
You can use SVG as...
“Yes or No?”
23.12.2020
Sara Soueidan digs into this HTML/UX situation. “Yes” or “no” is a boolean situation. A checkbox represents this: it’s either on or off (uh, mostly). But is a checkbox always the best UX? It depends, of course:
Use radio buttons if you expect the answer to be equally...
What’s Old is New
18.12.2020
This year, I learned a lot about how “old” tricks can solve a lot of modern problems if you use the right tools. Following the growth of Jamstack-style development has been both a learning experience, while also a nostalgic one. It’s been amazing to see how you can power plain...
I learned to love the Same-Origin Policy
17.12.2020
I spent a good chunk of my work life this year trying (in collaboration with the amazing Noam Rosenthal) to standardize a new web platform feature: a way to modify the intrinsic size and resolution of images. And hey! We did it! But boy, was it ever a learning experience.
This wasn’t my first...
What’s New in WCAG 2.1: Label in Name
15.12.2020
WCAG 2.1 Recommendations rolled out in 2018. It’s been a couple years now and there are some new Success Criterion. In this article, I will discuss Label in Name, which is how we visually label components. We’ll take a look at what some failure states look like, how to fix them, and examples of...
HTTP Archive’s Annual State of the Web Report
14.12.2020
The HTTP Archive looked at more than 7 million websites and compiled their annual report detailing how the sites were built. And there’s an enormous wealth of information about how the web changed in 2020. In fact, this report is more like an enormous book and it’s entirely fabulous. The data comes...
Optimize Images According to Network and Device Constraints in React
10.12.2020
Connectivity has evolved beyond recognition since the beginning of the internet. We are lightyears past dial up, these days, and can watch a video in high resolution on our smartphone while being connected to a mobile network. But not all mobile connections are created equal – older...
npm ruin dev
9.12.2020
In 2020, I rediscovered the enjoyment of building a website with plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no transpilin’, no compilin’, no build tools other than my hands on the keyboard.
Seeing as my personal brand could be summed up “so late to the game that the stadium has been demolished,”...
Minimal Takes on Faking Container Queries
2.12.2020
It’s sounding more and more likely that we’re actually going to get real container queries. Google is prototyping a syntax idea from David Baron and refined by Miriam Suzanne. Apparently, there has already been some prototyping done for a switch() syntax which is like container queries...
How to Make an Area Chart With CSS
2.12.2020
You might know a few ways to create charts with pure CSS. Some of them are covered here on CSS-Tricks, and many others can be found on CodePen, but I haven’t seen many examples of “area charts” (imagine a line chart with the bottom area filled in), particularly any in HTML and CSS alone. In this...
How to Add Text in Borders Using Basic HTML Elements
1.12.2020
Some HTML elements come with preset designs, like the inconveniently small squares of <input type="checkbox"> elements, the limited-color bars of <meter> elements, and the “something about them bothers me” arrows of the <details> elements. We can style them to match...
Under-Engineered Responsive Tables
1.12.2020
I first blogged about responsive data tables in 2011. When responsive web design was first becoming a thing, there were little hurdles like data tables that had to be jumped. The nature of <table> elements are that they have something a minimum width depending on the content they contain...
A Complete State Machine Made With HTML Checkboxes and CSS
27.11.2020
State machines are typically expressed on the web in JavaScript and often through the popular XState library. But the concept of a state machine is adaptable to just about any language, including, amazingly, HTML and CSS. In this article, we’re going to do exactly that. I recently built a website...
Three Things You Didn’t Know About AVIF
26.11.2020
AVIF, the file format based on the AV1 video codec, is the latest addition to the next-gen image formats. Early reports and comparisons show good results compared to JPEG and WebP. However, even if browser support is good, AVIF is still on the bleeding edge in regards to encoding and decoding....
Rendering Spectrum
25.11.2020
Here are the big categories of rendering websites:
Client: ship a <div id="root"></div> and let a JavaScript template render all of it.
Static: pre-render all the HTML.
Server: let a live server process requests and generate the HTML response.
They are not mutually exclusive....