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The Communal Cycle of Sharing
18.11.2019
What I'm interested in this year is how we're continuing to expand on tools, services, and shared side projects to collectively guide where we take the web next, and the way we're sharing that.
So many other mediums—mostly analog ones—have been around for ages and have a deeper history. In...
When to Use SVG vs. When to Use Canvas
12.11.2019
SVG and canvas are both technologies that can draw stuff in web browsers, so they are worth comparing and understanding when one is more suitable than the other. Even a light understanding of them makes the choice of choosing one over the other pretty clear.
A little flat-color icon? That's...
Disabled buttons suck
11.11.2019
In this oldie but goodie, Hampus Sethfors digs into why disabled buttons are troubling for usability reasons and he details one example where this was pretty annoying for him. The same has happened to me recently where I clicked a button that looked like a secondary button and... nothing happened....
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...
Let’s Make a Fancy, but Uncomplicated Page Loader
15.10.2019
It’s pretty common to see a loading state on sites these days, particularly as progressive web apps and reactive sites are on the rise. It’s one way to improve "perceived" performance — that is, making it feel as though the site is loading faster than it actually is.
There’s no shortage of ways...
Recipes for Performance Testing Single Page Applications in WebPageTest
10.10.2019
WebPageTest is an online tool and an Open Source project to help developers audit the performance of their websites. As a Web Performance Evangelist at Theodo, I use it every single day. I am constantly amazed at what it offers to the web development community at large and the web performance folks...
A Snippet to See all SVGs in a Sprite
8.10.2019
I think of an SVG sprite as this:
<svg display="none">
<symbol id="icon-one"> ... <symbol>
<symbol id="icon-two"> ... <symbol>
<symbol id="icon-three"> ... <symbol>
</svg>
I was long a fan of that approach for icon systems...
Some Hands-On with the HTML Dialog Element
7.10.2019
This is me looking at the HTML <dialog> element for the first time. I've been aware of it for a while, but haven't taken it for a spin yet. It has some pretty cool and compelling features. I can't decide for you if you should use it in production on your sites, but I'd think it's starting...
Bankers Start to Recognize Bitcoin’s Role in Financial Evolution
29.9.2019
Digitization, disruption, blockchain, and frictionless payments. It’s amazing how prominent figures from the financial elite can provide a pretty detailed description of decentralized money without uttering “bitcoin” or “crypto.” But the fact of the matter is that...
Variable Fonts Link Dump!
21.9.2019
There's been a ton of great stuff flying around about variable fonts lately (our tag has loads of stuff as well). I thought I'd round up all the new stuff I hadn't seen before.
Google fonts has a beta of hosted variable fonts and the announcement demo is on CodePen.
Speaking of Google Fonts...
(Why) Some HTML is “optional”
16.9.2019
Remy Sharp digs into the history of the web and describes why the <p> tag doesn’t need to be closed like this:
<p>Paragraphs don’t need to be closed
<p>Pretty weird, huh?
Remy writes:
Pre-DOM, pre-browsers, the world's first browser was being written by Sir...
Recreating Netlify’s Neat-o Sliding Button Effect
3.9.2019
Have you seen Netlify's press page? It's one of those places where you can snag a download of the company's logo. I was looking for it this morning because I needed the logo to use as a featured image for a post here on CSS-Tricks.
Well, I noticed they have these pretty looking buttons to download...
The Best (GraphQL) API is One You Write
30.8.2019
Listen, I am no GraphQL expert but I do enjoy working with it. The way it exposes data to me as a front-end developer is pretty cool. It's like a menu of available data and I can ask for whatever I want. That's a massive improvement over REST and highly empowering for me as a front-end developer...
Jeremy Keith – Building the Web
23.8.2019
I really enjoyed this interview with Jeremy Keith on the state of the web, how things have changed in recent years and why he’s a mix of optimistic and nervous for the future.
One thing that caught my attention during the interview more than anything was where Jeremy started discussing how folks...
A More Accessible Portals Demo
31.7.2019
The point of the <portal> element (behind a flag in Chrome Canary) is that you can preload another whole page (like <iframe>), but then have APIs to animate it to the current page. So "Single Page App"-like functionality (SPA), but natively. I think that's pretty cool. I'm a fan...
The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously
30.7.2019
Scott Jehl:
One of the most impactful things we can do to improve page performance and resilience is to load CSS in a way that does not delay page rendering. That’s because by default, browsers will load external CSS synchronously—halting all page rendering while the CSS is downloaded...
Zdog
24.7.2019
David DeSandro has loads of super cool JavaScript libraries he's created over the years. His latest is Zdog, a "round, flat, designer-friendly pseudo-3D engine for canvas & SVG." It's only been about a month since he dropped it (although, like any good library, it's been simmering) and it...
Unsuck It
23.7.2019
Julia Carrie Wong and Matthew Cantor's How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained was pretty hilarious. A little something in there to offend everyone.
Speaking of kinda douchey words, I'm reminded of one of my favorite sites on the internet: Unsuck It. Not only does...
Multi-Line Truncation with Pure CSS
17.7.2019
Truncating a single line of text if is fairly straightforward. Truncating multiple lines is a bit harder. Using just CSS (no JavaScript or server-side dancing) is nice for the simplicity. It's gotten a little easier lately since Firefox (since version 68) has started supporting the ultra-bizarre...
Introducing Netlify Analytics
10.7.2019
You work a while on a side project. You think it's pretty cool! You decide to release it into the world. And then… it goes well. Or it doesn’t go well. Wait, is that right? You forgot to add analytics — it just didn’t cross your mind at the time. Now you’re pretty curious how many people have...