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Chrome Lite Pages
19.3.2019
The Chrome team announced a new feature called Lite Pages that can be activated by flipping on the Data Saver option on an Android device:
Chrome on Android’s Data Saver feature helps by automatically optimizing web pages to make them load faster. When users are facing network or data constraints...
Using Local with Flywheel
19.3.2019
Have you seen Local by Flywheel? It's a native app for helping set up local WordPress developer environments. I absolutely love it and use it to do all my local WordPress development work. It brings a lovingly designed GUI to highly technical tasks in a way that I think works very well. Plus...
Stacked “Borders”
19.3.2019
A little while back, I was in the process of adding focus styles to An Event Apart’s web site. Part of that was applying different focus effects in different areas of the design, like white rings in the header and footer and orange rings in the main text. But in one place, I wanted rings that were...
Crafting Reusable HTML Templates
19.3.2019
In our last article, we discussed the Web Components specifications (custom elements, shadow DOM, and HTML templates) at a high-level. In this article, and the three to follow, we will put these technologies to the test and examine them in greater detail and see how we can use them in production...
The Whole Spreadsheets as Databases Thing is Pretty Cool
18.3.2019
A spreadsheet has always been a strong (if fairly literal) analogy for a database. A database has tables, which is like a single spreadsheet. Imagine a spreadsheet for tracking RSVPs for a wedding. Across the top, column titles like First Name, Last Name, Address, and Attending?. Those titles...
An Introduction to Web Components
18.3.2019
Front-end development moves at a break-neck pace. This is made evident by the myriad articles, tutorials, and Twitter threads bemoaning the state of what once was a fairly simple tech stack. In this article, I’ll discuss why Web Components are a great tool to deliver high-quality user experiences...
People Digging into Grid Sizing and Layout Possibilities
15.3.2019
Jen Simmons has been coining the term intrinsic design, referring to a new era in web layout where the sizing of content has gone beyond fluid columns and media query breakpoints and into, I dunno, something a bit more exotic. For example, columns that are sized more by content and guidelines than...
Design Systems and Portfolios
15.3.2019
In my experience working with design systems, I’ve found that I have to sacrifice my portfolio to do it well. Unlike a lot of other design work where it’s relatively easy to present Dribbble-worthy interfaces and designs, I fear that systems are quite a bit trickier than that.
You could make things...
See No Evil: Hidden Content and Accessibility
15.3.2019
There is no one true way to hide something on the web. Nor should there be, because hiding is too vague. Are you hiding visually or temporarily (like a user menu), but the content should still be accessible? Are you hiding it from assistive tech on purpose? Are you showing it to assistive tech...
Web Standards Meet User-Land: Using CSS-in-JS to Style Custom Elements
15.3.2019
The popularity of CSS-in-JS has mostly come from the React community, and indeed many CSS-in-JS libraries are React-specific. However, Emotion, the most popular library in terms of npm downloads, is framework agnostic.
Using the shadow DOM is common when creating custom elements, but there’s...
Little Things That Tickled My Brain from An Event Apart Seattle
14.3.2019
I had so much fun at An Event Apart Seattle! There is something nice about sitting back and basking in the messages from a variety of such super smart people.
I didn't take comprehensive notes of each talk, but I did jot down little moments that flickered my brain. I'll post them here! Blogging...
7 things you should know when getting started with Serverless APIs
14.3.2019
I want you to take a second and think about Twitter, and think about it in terms of scale. Twitter has 326 million users. Collectively, we create ~6,000 tweets every second. Every minute, that’s 360,000 tweets created. That sums up to nearly 200 billion tweets a year. Now, what if the creators...
Perfect Image Optimization for Mobile with Optimole
14.3.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
In 2015 there were 24,000 different Android devices, and each of them was capable of downloading images. And this was just the beginning. The mobile era is starting to gather pace with mobile visitors starting to eclipse desktop. One thing is certain, building...
The Benefits of Structuring CSS Around Appearance and Layout
13.3.2019
I like this point that Jonathan Snook made on Twitter and I’ve been thinking about it non-stop because it describes something that’s really hard about writing CSS:
I feel like that tweet sounds either very shallow or very deep depending on how you look at it but in reality, I don't think...
The Process of Implementing A UI Design From Scratch
13.3.2019
This is a fantastic post by Ahmad Shadeed. It digs into the practical construction of a header on a website — the kind of work that many of us regularly do. It looks like it's going to be fairly easy to create the header at first, but it starts to get complicated as considerations for screen...
Planning for Responsive Images
13.3.2019
The first time I made an image responsive, it was as simple as coding these four lines:
img {
max-width: 100%;
height auto; /* default */
}
Though that worked for me as a developer, it wasn’t the best for the audience. What happens if the the image in the src attribute is heavy? On high-end...
Designing An Aspect Ratio Unit For CSS
13.3.2019
Rachel Andrew says that the CSS Working Group designed an aspect ration unit at a recent meeting. The idea is to find an elegant solution to those times when we want the height of an element to be calculated in response to the width of the element, or vice versa.
Say, for example, we have a grid...
Smooth Scrolling for Screencasts
13.3.2019
Let's say you wanted to scroll a web page from top to bottom programmatically. For example, you're recording a screencast and want a nice full-page scroll. You probably can't scroll it yourself because it'll be all uneven and jerky. Native JavaScript can do smooth scrolling. Here's a tiny snippet...
Application Holotypes
13.3.2019
It's entirely too common to make broad-sweeping statements about all websites. Jason Miller:
We often make generalizations about applications we see in the wild, both anecdotal and statistical: "Single-Page Applications are slower than multipage" or "apps with low TTI loaded fast". However,...
Getting into GraphQL with AWS AppSync
12.3.2019
GraphQL is becoming increasingly popular. The problem is that if you are a front-end developer, you are only half of the way there. GraphQL is not just a client technology. The server also has to be implemented according to the specification. This means that in order to implement GraphQL into your...