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Now You See It
16.12.2019
I recently accepted a teaching position at a local college here in SoCal where I'll be spouting off whatever I know (or more likely don't know!) about HTML and CSS. It's suffice to say I was all ears (well, actually eyes) when Rachel Andrew recently published a post on teaching CSS.
The display...
Blue Beanie Day 2019
13.12.2019
November 30th, the official "Blue Beanie Day," has come and gone. I'm not sure I ever grokked the exact spirit of it, but I've written about what it means to me. Last year:
Web standards, as an overall idea, has entirely taken hold and won the day. That's worth celebrating, as the web would...
Adam Argyle’s 2020 CSS Predictions
13.12.2019
I think Adam's first prediction is his boldest, even beyond his Hail Mary prediction. CSS grid is awesome and gap is perhaps one of its best qualities, but gap superseding spacing things out in other ways (e.g. margin) is a bold prediction indeed, especially with Firefox being the only browser...
Yap
13.12.2019
Interesting idea for a "chat room" from Postlight:
Create a Yap chat room.
Invite others to join and talk.
Share a URL of just about anything.
Everyone gathering can comment on what you’ve shared.
If you think your conversation deserves an audience, share the URL of your chat publicly.
Only...
Detecting Inactive Users
13.12.2019
Most of the time you don’t really care about whether a user is actively engaged or temporarily inactive on your application. Inactive, meaning, perhaps they got up to get a drink of water, or more likely, changed tabs to do something else for a bit. There are situations, though, when tracking...
lite-youtube-embed
13.12.2019
A standard copy-and-paste YouTube embed lands on your page as an <iframe> which loads a big ol' pile of other stuff to play that video. But the UX of it is still essentially an image and a play button. Click the play button and the video plays. You can build essentially the same thing with...
Weekly Platform News: Strict Tracking Protection, Dark Web Pages, Periodic Background Sync
12.12.2019
In this week's news: Firefox gets strict, Opera goes to the dark side, and Chrome plans to let web apps run in the background.
Let's get into the news.
Firefox for Android will block tracking content
Mozilla has announced that the upcoming revamped Firefox for Android (currently available in...
Dip Your Toes Into Hardware With WebMIDI
12.12.2019
Did you know there is a well-supported browser API that allows you to interface with interesting and even custom-built hardware using a mature protocol that predates the web? Let me introduce you to MIDI and the WebMIDI API and show you how it presents a unique opportunity for front-end developers...
How I’ve Improved as a Web Developer (and a Person) in 2019
11.12.2019
We’re sliding into the roaring twenties of the twenty-first century (cue Jazz music 🎷). It’s important that you and I, as responsible people, follow the tradition of looking back on the past year and reflect on the things that went right and wrong in the hopes of becoming the best version...
Freak Flags
11.12.2019
I don't see image sprites used that much anymore, but it's still a good technique for reducing downloaded decorative image assets when you have multiple on a page. The big idea is combining all the graphics into one and then shifting around the size and background-position to reveal one at...
Just Sharing My Gulpfile
11.12.2019
Seemingly out of the blue, the Gulp processing I had set up for this site started to have a race condition. I'd run my watch command, change some CSS, and the processing would sometimes leave behind some extra files that were meant to be cleaned up during the processing. Like the cleanup tasks...
Making a Better Custom Select Element
11.12.2019
We just covered The Current State of Styling Selects in 2019, but we didn't get nearly as far and fancy as Julie Grundy gets here. There is a decent chunk of JavaScript that powers it, so I'm still very much eyeballing browsers' recent interest in giving us more powerful selects in (presumably)...
WordPress.com: One CMS, Infinite Possibilities
11.12.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Have you ever looked at a site and knew exactly what CMS powers it? You might see a distinctive design aesthetic that gives it away. Or maybe it's something even less obvious and even harder to articulate, but you know it when you see it.
That seems true with just about...
Quoting in HTML: Quotations, Citations, and Blockquotes
10.12.2019
It’s all too common to see the incorrect HTML used for quotes in markup. In this article, let’s dig into all this, looking at different situations and different HTML tags to handle those situations.
There are three major HTML elements involved...
How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers
9.12.2019
Dylan Paulus:
Facebook actually hides 'dummy' DOM nodes between the 'Sponsored' text. These values are entirely random characters, with a random number of DOM nodes between them. Invisible characters. At this point our CSS ad blocker is completely broken. There is no way for us to possibly code...
Music and Web Design
9.12.2019
Brad has a long history in music outside of being a web designer, and draws some interesting parallels. One is that he had reached for more complex music in an effort to become a better musician — and developers can do the same thing. The other is that the composition of music can be seen...
A Handy Sass-Powered Tool for Making Balanced Color Palettes
9.12.2019
For those who may not come from a design background, selecting a color palette is often based on personal preferences. Choosing colors might be done with an online color tool, sampling from an image, "borrowing" from favorite brands, or just sort of randomly picking from a color wheel until...
Motion Paths – Past, Present and Future
6.12.2019
Cassie Evans has a great intro to motion paths. That is, being able to animate an element along a path. Not just up/down/left/right, but whatever curvy/wiggly/weird path you want.
It's an interesting subject because there are so many different technologies helping to do it over time. SMIL...
Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2019 refresh
6.12.2019
Lynn Fisher walks us step-by-step through the redesign process of her latest outstanding personal website. In this design, increasing the width of the browser window will cause the illustrations on the page crack to open and reveal more within them:
This case study reminded me that Lynn also has...
Techniques for Rendering Text with WebGL
6.12.2019
As is the rule in WebGL, anything that seems like it should be simple is actually quite complicated. Drawing lines, debugging shaders, text rendering… they are all damn hard to do well in WebGL.
Isn’t that weird? WebGL doesn't have a built-in function for rendering text. Although text seems like...