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The Case of the Stolen Domain Names
10.2.2020
Back in 2011, the domain name for this site, css-tricks.com, was stolen. "Domain Hijacking," they call it. It wasn't just this site, but around 12 others in the design and development space. To this day, none of us really know how it happened and who was behind it, although I believe all...
Helping Browsers Optimize With The CSS Contain Property
10.2.2020
There is a growing number of things that we have to do to help the browser achieve for peak performance.
Responsive image syntax has several. For example, needing to tell the browser how large the image will be in our layout with the sizes attribute and how big the images are with w descriptors....
Is Having an RSS Feed Just Giving Content Away for Free?
7.2.2020
I mean, kinda.
I was just asked this question the other day so I'm answering here because blogging is cool.
The point of an RSS feed is for people to read your content elsewhere (hence the last part of the acronym, Syndication, as in, broadcasting elsewhere). Probably an RSS reader. But RSS...
Guillermo’s 2019 in Review
7.2.2020
Of all the tech-focused year-in-review posts I read, Guillermo Rauch's is my favorite. There is a lot in there, jumping from topics like modern architectures, high-fiving specific apps, and philosophical movements.
I'll pick one quote about the rise of "deploy previews":
A salient feature is...
Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features
7.2.2020
It’s entirely possible to build custom checkboxes, radio buttons, and toggle switches these days, while staying semantic and accessible. We don’t even need a single line of JavaScript or extra HTML elements! It’s actually gotten easier lately than it has been in the past. Let’s take a look.
Here’s...
Old CSS, new CSS
7.2.2020
I love this post that walks through the development of CSS and HTML — it shows just how far web design has come and how much easier it is for us all now.
Eevee looks at designing websites with tables, the Space Jam website, and how for centuries there was no way to easily inspect changes made to...
Full-Width Elements By Using Edge-to-Edge Grid
7.2.2020
If you have a limited-width container, say a centered column of text, "breaking out" of that to make a full-width element involves trickery. Perhaps the best trick is the one with left relative positioning and a negative left viewport-based margin. While it has it's caveats (e.g. requiring hidden...
Getting Fancy with position: sticky;
7.2.2020
Mike Solomon worked on a fancy scrollytelling post for Esquire and blogged about it. It has GIFs of each step along the way of figuring out not just position: sticky; but also using negative margins, wrapper divs, backgrounds, and even a smidge of JavaScript measuring to get it all right.
What...
Getting Acquainted With Svelte, the New Framework on the Block
6.2.2020
For the last six years, Vue, Angular, and React have run the world of front-end component frameworks. Google and Facebook have their own sponsored frameworks, but they might leave a bitter taste for anyone who advocates for an open and unbiased web. Vue is another popular framework that...
Building an accessible autocomplete control
6.2.2020
Here’s a great in-depth post from Adam Silver about his journey to create an autocomplete field that’s as accessible as possible. There are so many edge cases to consider! There are old browsers and their peculiar quirks, there are accessibility best practices for screen readers, and not to mention...
Browser Version Release Spectrum
6.2.2020
Whenever a browser upgrades versions, it's a little marketing event, and rightly so. Looks like for Firefox it's about once a month, Chrome is ~6 weeks, and Safari is once a year.
Chrome 80 just dropped, as they say, and we get a video and blog post. What strikes me about releases like this these...
HTTPS is Easy!
5.2.2020
I've been guilty of publicly bemoaning the complexity of HTTPS. In the past, I've purchased SSL certificates from third-party vendors and had trouble installing them. I've had certificates expire and had to scramble to fix them. I've had to poke and prod hosting companies to help me ensure things...
Native Image Lazy Loading in Chrome Is Way Too Eager
5.2.2020
Interesting research from Aaron Peters on <img loading="lazy" ... >:
On my 13 inch macbook, with Dock positioned on the left, the viewport height in Chrome is 786 pixels so images with loading="lazy" that are more than 4x the viewport down the page are eagerly fetched by Chrome...
CSS4 is a Bad Idea
5.2.2020
Louis Lazaris, reacting to the idea of CSS4:
The reason “CSS3” worked is because it was real. It was the successor to “CSS2.1”. Everything after CSS2.1 was considered to be under the umbrella of “CSS3”.
The gist is that CSS4 isn't real, so won't work, and we don't need it anyway. Perhaps...
Creating an Editable Webpage With Google Spreadsheets and Tabletop.js
5.2.2020
Please raise your hand if you’ve ever faced never-ending content revision requests from your clients. It’s not that the changes themselves are difficult, but wouldn't it be less complicated if clients could just make the revisions themselves? That would save everyone valuable time, and  allow...
Select an Element with a Non-Empty Attribute
5.2.2020
Short answer:
[data-foo]:not([data-foo=""] {
Longer answer (same conclusion, just an explanation on why we might need this):
Say you have an element that you style with a special data-attribute:
<div data-highlight="product"</div
You want to target that element and do special things when...
CSS4
4.2.2020
Tab Atkins in 2012:
There has never been a CSS4. There will never be a CSS4. CSS4 is not a thing that exists.
Rachel Andrew in 2016:
While referring to all new CSS as CSS3 worked for a short time, it doesn’t reflect the reality of where CSS is today. If you read something...
How To Create A Headless WordPress Site On The JAMstack
4.2.2020
Just this morning, Chris shared a streamlined way to get a static site up and running with Netlify. As it happens, Sarah and I also wrote up a little something that expands that idea where a static site can pull content from WordPress using the REST API.
Using Vue, Nuxt, axios and Netlify, it's...
PHP is A-OK for Templating
4.2.2020
PHP templating often gets a bad rap for facilitating subpar code — but that doesn't have to be the case. Let’s look at how PHP projects can enforce a basic Model, View, Controller (MVC) structure without depending on a purpose-built templating engine.
But first, a very brief PHP history lesson
The...
Overcomplicatin’
4.2.2020
There's some famous quote that goes something like...
When we're young, we make simple things because that's all we know. Then we learn how to make complex things so we make complex things. When we grow old, we learn to make simple things again.
Brad recently wrote about this abstractly in regard...