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Weekly Platform News: Upgrading Navigations to HTTPS, Sale of .org Domains, New Browser Engine
5.12.2019
In this week's roundup: DuckDuckGo gets smarter encryption, a fight over the sale of dot org domains, and a new browser engine is in the works.
Let's get into the news!
DuckDuckGo upgrades and open-sources its encryption
DuckDuckGo has open-sourced its “Smarter Encryption” technology that enables...
Auto Layout lands in Figma
5.12.2019
Here’s a fresh update to my favorite design tool that is thoroughly exciting: Auto layout! That means we can make frames that resize based on the size of the content within it. That's particularly useful for buttons in a design system where you want to drop a button on the page and then keep...
The Rising Complexity of JAMstack Sites and How to Manage Them
5.12.2019
When you add anything with user-generated content or dynamic data to a static site, the complexity of the build process can become comparable to launching a monolithic CMS. How can we add rich content to static sites without stitching together multiple third-party services?
For people in...
Firefox 71: First Out of the Gate With Subgrid
5.12.2019
A great release from Firefox this week! See the whole roundup post from Chris Mills. I'm personally stoked to see clip-path: path(); go live, which we've been tracking as it's so clearly useful. We also get column-span: all; which is nice in case you're one of the few taking advantages of...
Filtering Lists Dynamically With Vue on the Server Side is Easier Than You’d Think
4.12.2019
I recently attended the ARTIFACT conference in Austin, TX, and was inspired by a few talks about accessibility through the lens of site performance. It became clear to me that there is this tendency to rely on big JavaScript frameworks to handle the work — like React, Vue, and Angular — but that...
WhoCanUse
4.12.2019
There are loads of microsites and developer tools for looking at color accessibility, including tools built right into browser DevTools. They often show you if a color passes AA or AAA WCAG guidelines. But color contrast is more complicated than that because there is a wide variety of vision...
The New Klim Type Website is Impossibly Lovely
4.12.2019
I’ve spent the last hour hunched over the new Klim Type foundry website with my arms outstretched as if it was a fire in a very dark cave. Klim Type makes and sells wondrous fonts — like Tiempos, and National 2 or Pitch — and this fresh redesign now showcases them in all their glory. Here’s...
Dark Mode Favicons
4.12.2019
Oooo! A bonafide trick from Thomas Steiner. Chrome will soon be supporting SVG favicons (e.g. <link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg">). And you can embed CSS within an SVG with a <style> element. That CSS can use a perfers-color-sceme media query, and as a result, a favicon that supports...
State of JavaScript 2019 Survey
3.12.2019
Well, hey, look at that — it's time for this year's State of JavaScript survey!
You have taken this survey last year. Or in 2017. Or in 2016. It's been going on for a little while now and it always lends interesting insights into things like the features developers are using, the popularity...
Save Big on An Event Apart for a Limited Time!
3.12.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
If you could get one gift from your boss this holiday season, what would you want it to be? You know, other than the usual mouse pad, picture frame or, my favorite, the ol' coffee mug and Starbucks card combo.
What if you were to receive something, hmm, more substantial?...
Save Big on An Event Apart for a Limited Time!
3.12.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
If you could get one gift from your boss this holiday season, what would you want it to be? You know, other than the usual mouse pad, picture frame or, my favorite, the ol' coffee mug and Starbucks card combo.
What if you were to receive something, hmm, more substantial?...
Masking GIFs with other GIFs
3.12.2019
The other day, Cassie Evans tweeted a really neat trick that I’ve never seen before: using SVG to mask one GIF on top of another. The effect is quite lovely, especially if you happen to grab a colorful GIF and place it on top of a monochrome one:
See the Pen
Masking gifs with other gifs......
Having a Little Fun With Custom Focus Styles
2.12.2019
Every front-end developer has dealt or will deal with this scenario: your boss, client or designer thinks the outline applied by browsers on focused elements does not match the UI, and asks you to remove it. Or you might even be looking to remove it yourself.
So you do a little research and find...
“Headless Mode”
2.12.2019
A couple of months ago, we invited Marc Anton Dahmen to show off his database-less content management system (CMS) Automad. His post is an interesting inside look at templating engines, including how they work, how CMSs use them, and how they impact the way we write things, such as loops.
Well...
The Jim Bell System
2.12.2019
As I write this article on July 3, 2002, I am already hearing out my window the occasional pops of micro-explosives enthusiasts getting a head start on their annual excuse to play with things that go bang and supposedly celebrate their freedom. Tomorrow, libertarians across the country will use...
Simplified Fluid Typography
29.11.2019
Fluid typography is the idea that font-size (and perhaps other attributes of type, like line-height) change depending on the screen size (or perhaps container queries if we had them).
The core trickery comes from viewport units. You can literally set type in viewport units (e.g. font-size: 4vw)...
Testing React Hooks With Enzyme and React Testing Library
29.11.2019
As you begin to make use of React hooks in your applications, you’ll want to be certain the code you write is nothing short of solid. There’s nothing like shipping buggy code. One way to be certain your code is bug-free is to write tests. And testing React hooks is not much different from how React...
Web Scraping Made Simple With Zenscrape
28.11.2019
Web scraping has always been taken care of by actual developers, since a lot of coding, proxy management and CAPTCHA-solving is involved. However, the scraped data is very often needed by people that are non-coders: Marketers, Analysts, Business Developers etc.
Zenscrape is an easy-to-use...
The Power (and Fun) of Scope with CSS Custom Properties
27.11.2019
You’re probably already at least a little familiar with CSS variables. If not, here’s a two-second overview: they are really called custom properties, you set them in declaration blocks like --size: 1em and use them as values like font-size: var(--size);, they differ from preprocessor variables...
iOS 13 Broke the Classic Pure CSS Parallax Technique
27.11.2019
I know. You hate parallax. You know what we should hate more? When things that used to work on the web stop working without any clear warning or idea why.
Way back in 2014, Keith Clark blogged an exceptionally clever CSS trick where you essentially use a CSS transform to scale an element down...