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Enhancing The Clickable Area Size
1.10.2019
Here’s a great post by Ahmad Shadeed on making sure that clickable areas in our interfaces are, well, clickable. He writes about making sure that links, buttons and other elements meet accessibility standards for both touch and mouse, too.
I particularly like the section where Ahmad writes about...
“Off The Main Thread”
10.9.2019
JavaScript is what they call "single-threaded." As Brian Barbour puts it:
This means it has one call stack and one memory heap.
We all feel a symptom of that regularly in the form of performance jank and non-interactivity on elements or entire sites. If we give JavaScript lots of jobs and it gets...
Working with Attributes on DOM Elements
30.8.2019
The DOM is just a little weird about some things, and the way you deal with attributes is no exception. There are a number of ways to deal with the attributes on elements. By attributes, I mean things like the id in <div id="cool"></div>. Sometimes you need to set them. Sometimes...
Nested Gradients with background-clip
28.8.2019
I can't say I use background-clip all that often. I'd wager it's hardly ever used in day-to-day CSS work. But I was reminded of it in a post by Stefan Judis, which consistently was itself a learning-response post to a post over here by Ana Tudor.
Here's a quick explanation.
You've probably seen...
Creating a Maintainable Icon System with Sass
28.8.2019
One of my favorite ways of adding icons to a site is by including them as data URL background images to pseudo-elements (e.g. ::after) in my CSS. This technique offers several advantages:
They don't require any additional HTTP requests other than the CSS file.
Using the background-size property...
Weekly Platform News: Preventing Image Loads with the Picture Element, the Web We Want, Svg Styles Are Not Scoped
1.8.2019
In this week's week roundup of browser news, a trick for loading images conditionally using the picture element, your chance to tell bowser vendors about the web you want, and the styles applied to inline SVG elements are, well, not scoped only to that SVG.
Let's turn to...
Smooth Scrolling Image Effects
23.7.2019
A small set of ideas on animating images and other elements while smooth scrolling a page.
Smooth Scrolling Image Effects was written by Mary Lou and published on Codrops
Debugging CSS Grid with Firefox Dev Tools
16.7.2019
CSS Grid is mostly composed of rows, columns, cells, tracks, gaps etc. These things are not elements by themselves; hence, it can be really tasking to visualize and debug them. In this post, we’ll
Color Inputs: A Deep Dive into Cross-Browser Differences
12.7.2019
In this article, we'll be taking a look at the structure inside <input type='color'> elements, browser inconsistencies, why they look a certain way in a certain browser, and how to dig into it. Having a good understanding of this input allows us to evaluate whether a certain cross-browser...
A Little Reminder That Pseudo Elements are Children, Kinda.
8.7.2019
Here's a container with some child elements:
<div class="container">
<div>item</div>
<div>item</div>
<div>item</div>
</div>
If I do:
.container::before {
content: "x"
}
I'm essentially doing:
<div class="container">
...
React Starter: How does JSX make HTML elements?
3.7.2019
JSX makes making React components easier. Some may find JSX to have a high learning curve and that's totally understandable. It's not exactly HTML and it's not exactly JavaScript, so it can take so
Toast
3.7.2019
One day, all the sudden, I started hearing jokes about toast. I had no idea what the context was. I assumed some friends just got started telling toast jokes, which isn't rare by any means. But it turns out it was a whole thing. It got me thinking, jeez, if I can't keep up with this stuff when it's...
Restricting a (pseudo) element to its parent’s border-box
2.7.2019
Have you ever wanted to ensure that nothing of a (pseudo) element gets displayed outside its parent's border-box? In case you're having trouble picturing what that looks like, let's say we wanted to get the following result with minimal markup and avoiding brittle CSS.
The desired result.
This...
Set Video Playback Speed with JavaScript
2.7.2019
I love that media has moved from custom plugins (Flash…gross) to basic HTML <video> and <audio> elements. Treating these media sources as just another element allows us to use CSS filters to adjust display, for example. The less we need to do with ffmpeg or plugins, the better. I’ve been...
Different Approaches for Creating a Staggered Animation
27.6.2019
Animating elements, at its most basic, is fairly straightforward. Define the keyframes. Name the animation. Call it on an element.
But sometimes we need something a little more complex to get the right “feel" for the way things move. For example, a sound equalizer might use the same animation...
Different Approaches for Creating a Staggered Animation
27.6.2019
Animating elements, at its most basic, is fairly straightforward. Define the keyframes. Name the animation. Call it on an element.
But sometimes we need something a little more complex to get the right “feel" for the way things move. For example, a sound equalizer might use the same animation...
CSS :focus-within
25.6.2019
Using :hover to display additional information or elements is a very useful technique but a big drawback to using the hover pseudo-class is that they are usually not accessibility-friendly. Not everyone uses a mouse and some users have visual impairments, so they rely on screen readers or...
Hello Subgrid!
20.6.2019
Rachel Andrew’s talk at CSSconf is wonderful because it digs into one of the most exciting changes that’s coming soon to a browser near you: subgrid! That’s a change to the CSS Grid spec that allows for much greater flexibility for our visual designs. Subgrid allows us to set one grid on an entire...
How to Section Your HTML
18.6.2019
The sectioning elements in HTML5 are <nav>, <aside>, <article>, and <section>. <body> is also kind of a sectioning element since all content lying inside of it is part of the default document section.
Here is a brief explanation of each sectioning element...
What if we got aspect-ratio sized images by doing almost nothing?
7.6.2019
Say you have an image you're using in an <img> that is 800x600 pixels. Will it actually display as 800px wide on your site? It's very likely that it will not. We tend to put images into flexible container elements, and the image inside is set to width: 100%;. So perhaps that image ends...