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Comparing the Different Types of Native JavaScript Popups
31.10.2019
JavaScript has a variety of built-in popup APIs that display special UI for user interaction. Famously:
alert("Hello, World!");
The UI for this varies from browser to browser, but generally you’ll see a little window pop up front and center in a very show-stopping way that contains the message...
Build a 100% Serverless REST API with Firebase Functions & FaunaDB
31.10.2019
Indie and enterprise web developers alike are pushing toward a serverless architecture for modern applications. Serverless architectures typically scale well, avoid the need for server provisioning and most importantly are easy and cheap to set up! And that’s why I believe the next evolution...
It’s All In the Head: Managing the Document Head of a React Powered Site With React Helmet
30.10.2019
The document head might not be the most glamorous part of a website, but what goes into it is arguably just as important to the success of your website as its user interface. This is, after all, where you tell search engines about your website and integrate it with third-party applications like...
Using the Platform
29.10.2019
Tim Kadlec:
So much care and planning has gone into creating the web platform, to ensure that even as new features are added, they’re added in a way that doesn’t break the web for anyone using an older device or browser. Can you say the same for any framework out there? I don’t mean that to...
Are There Random Numbers in CSS?
29.10.2019
CSS allows you to create dynamic layouts and interfaces on the web, but as a language, it is static: once a value is set, it cannot be changed. The idea of randomness is off the table. Generating random numbers at runtime is the territory of JavaScript, not so much CSS. Or is it? If we factor in...
Learn to Make Your Site Inclusive, by Design
29.10.2019
Accessibility is our job. We hear it all the time. But the truth is that it often takes a back seat to competing priorities, deadlines, and decisions from above. How can we solve that?
That's where An Event Apart comes in. Making sites inclusive by design is just one of the many topics covered over...
The Current State of Styling Selects in 2019
28.10.2019
Best I could tell from the last time I compiled the most wished-for features of CSS, styling form controls was a major ask. Top 5, I'd say. And of the native form elements that people want to style, Greg Whitworth has some data that the <select> element is more requested than any other...
A Business Case for Dropping Internet Explorer
28.10.2019
The distance between Internet Explorer (IE) 11 and every other major browser is an increasingly gaping chasm. Adding support for a technologically obsolete browser adds an inordinate amount of time and frustration to development. Testing becomes onerous. Bug-fixing looms large. Developers have...
Animated Position of Focus Ring
27.10.2019
Maurice Mahan created FocusOverlay, a "library for creating overlays on focused elements." That description is a little confusing at you don't need a library to create focus styles. What the library actually does is animate the focus rings as focus moves from one element to another. It's based...
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...