Search
Bidirectional Horizontal Rules in CSS
25.10.2019
Say you have a <blockquote> and the design calls for a thick border along the left side. Well, you might not necessarily mean left side, but actually mean on the side of the start of the text.
That's exactly what CSS logical properties are meant to address, and Hussein Al Hammad has a nice...
The Landscape of Cross-Platform App Development
25.10.2019
I don't track this stuff very well, but I get it. If you want a native app for Android and iOS, it sure would be nice to only have to write it once rather than two very different languages. Roughly double your reach without doubling the work. More and more of these things are reaching into desktop...
Weekly Platform News: WebAPK Limited to Chrome, Discernible Focus Rectangles, Modal Window API
25.10.2019
In this week's roundup: "Add to home screen" has different meanings in Android, Chrome and Edge add some pop to focus rectangles on form inputs, and how third-party sites may be coming to a modal near you.
Let's get into the news.
WebAPKs are not available to Firefox on Android
On Android, both...
Understanding How Reducers are Used in Redux
24.10.2019
A reducer is a function that determines changes to an application’s state. It uses the action it receives to determine this change. We have tools, like Redux, that help manage an application’s state changes in a single store so that they behave consistently.
Why do we mention Redux when talking...
ImageKit.io: Image Optimization That Plugs Into Your Infrastructure
24.10.2019
Images are the most efficient means to showcase a product or service on a website. They make up for most of the visual content on our website.
But, the more images a webpage has, the more bandwidth it consumes, affecting the page load speed - a raging factor having a significant impact on not just...
Why Are Accessible Websites so Hard to Build?
23.10.2019
I was chatting with some front-end folks the other day about why so many companies struggle at making accessible websites. Why are accessible websites so hard to build? We learn about HTML, we make sure things are semantic and — voila! @— we have an accessible website. During the course...
What I Like About Writing Styles with Svelte
23.10.2019
There’s been a lot of well-deserved hype around Svelte recently, with the project accumulating over 24,000 GitHub stars. Arguably the simplest JavaScript framework out there, Svelte was written by Rich Harris, the developer behind Rollup. There’s a lot to like about Svelte (performance, built-in...
Digging Into the Preview Loading Animation in WordPress
22.10.2019
WordPress shipped the Block Editor (aka Gutenberg) back in version 5.0 and with it came a snazzy new post preview screen that shows the WordPress logo drawing itself while the preview loads.
That's what you get when saving a post draft and clicking the "Preview" button in the editor. How'd they...
Netlify Build Plugins Announcement
22.10.2019
Netlify just dropped a new thing: Build Plugins. (It's in beta, so you have to request access for now.) Here's my crack at explaining it, which is heavily informed from David Well's announcement video.
You might think of Netlify as that service that makes it easy to sling up some static files from...
Why Parcel Has Become My Go-To Bundler for Development
21.10.2019
Today we’re gonna talk about application bundlers — tools that simplify our lives as developers. At their core, bundlers pick your code from multiple files and put everything all together in one or more files in a logical order that are compiled and ready for use in a browser. Moreover, through...
Designing accessible color systems
21.10.2019
The team at Stripe explores how they’re refining their color palette to make it more accessible and legible for users across all their products and interfaces. Not only that but the team built a wonderful and yet entirely bonkers app for figuring out the ideal range of colors that they needed.
We...
Options for Hosting Your Own Non-JavaScript-Based Analytics
18.10.2019
There are loads of analytics platforms to help you track visitor and usage data on your sites. Perhaps most notably Google Analytics, which is widely used (including on this site), probably due to it's ease of integration, feature-richness, and the fact that it's free (until you need to jump up...
Laying the Foundations
18.10.2019
Here’s a new book by Andrew Couldwell all about design systems and his team’s experience at Sprout Social. For a while now they’ve been building Seeds, a brand guide that the internal team can and reference for brand and design-related things, including patterns, variables, and components....
JAMstack Tools and The Spectrum of Classification
17.10.2019
With the wonderful world of JAMstack getting big, all the categories of services and tools that help it along are as important as ever. There are static site generators, headless CMSs, and static file hosts.
I think those classifications are handy, and help conversations along. But there is a point...
Weekly Platform News: CSS column-span Property, ADA applies to Websites, Auto-generated Image Descriptions
17.10.2019
In this week's roundup: multi-column layouts gain wide support, the ADA means more A11y for retailers, and Google is doing something about all the empty image alt attributes in the wild.
The CSS column-span property will soon be widely supported
The CSS column-span property, which has been...
Making Tables Responsive With Minimal CSS
17.10.2019
Here’s a fabulous CSS trick from Bradley Taunt in which he shows how to make tables work on mobile with just a little bit of extra code. He styles each table row into a card that looks something like this:
See the Pen
Responsive Tables #2.5: Flexbox by Bradley Taunt (@bradleytaunt)
...
Get the Complete Intro to Web Development and Intro to React (with Hooks!) with Brian Holt ????
17.10.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Hey, Marc here from Frontend Masters — excited to support CSS-Tricks ❤️!
Have you checked out Brian Holt's courses yet? His most popular courses are the "Complete Intro" courses which give you the lay of the land in Web Development as well as...
The `hidden` Attribute is Visibly Weak
16.10.2019
There is an HTML attribute that does exactly what you think it should do:
<div>I'm visible</div>
<div hidden>I'm hidden</div>
It even has great browser support. Is it useful? Uhm. Maybe. Not really.
Adam Laki likes the semantics of it:
If we use the hidden...
Workflow Considerations for Using an Image Management Service
16.10.2019
There are all these sites out there that want to help you with your images. They do things like optimize your images and help you serve them performantly.
That's a very good thing. By any metric, images are a major slice of the resources on websites, and we're notoriously bad at optimizing them...
Ten-Ton Widgets
15.10.2019
At a recent conference talk (sorry, I forget which one), there was a quick example of poor web performance in the form of a third-party widget. The example showed a site that installed the widget in order add a "email us" button fixed to the bottom right of the viewport. Not even a live-chat widget...