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WDRL — Edition 264: Establish Principles, Long Work, Simple Living
18.4.2019
Hey,
This week, right before the long Easter weekend here, I stumbled upon “The beauty of being satisfied enough”. In times of advertising everywhere, discount days like ‘Black Friday’, and everyone telling you “you need this” or “save here” we’re constantly tempted to buy things we don’t...
A Website is a Car and Not a Book
15.4.2019
I’ve been wondering for a good long while why it feels like web design and development isn’t respected as much as native app development= and why the front-end role in many organizations is seen as a nice-to-have rather than a vital part of the business. Why is it so hard to see that this gig...
Revisiting the Rendering Tier
5.4.2019
Have you ever created a well-intentioned, thoughtful design system only to watch it grow into an ever-increasing and scary codebase? I've been working in sort of the opposite direction, inheriting the scary codebase and trying to create a thoughtful system from it.
Here's Alex Sanders on the topic...
A Couple of New Wufoo Tips
4.4.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
High fives to Wufoo, our long-time sponsor here on CSS-Tricks. It's powered the vast majority of forms I've built over the past decade. If you've never used it or heard of it: it's a form builder. It makes the arduous task of implementing forms trivially easy. Building...
Make it hard to screw up driven development
2.4.2019
Development is complicated. Our job is an ongoing battle between getting the job done and doing that job in a safe, long-lasting way.
Developers say things like, "I'm just going to do this quick and dirty first," because it's taken as fact that if you code anything quickly, it not only will...
React Starter: React Prerequisites and 4 ES6 Things to Know
2.4.2019
JavaScript has come a long way in the past decade, especially with the ES6 update.
JavaScript’s standardized name is ECMA Script and this version came in 2015. It was named ES2015 o
Accessibility is not a “React Problem”
11.3.2019
Leslie Cohn-Wein's main point:
While [lots of divs, inline styles, focus management problems] are valid concerns, it should be noted that nothing in React prevents us from building accessible web apps.
True. I'm quite capable (and sadly, guilty) of building inaccessible interfaces with React...
JavaScript Proxy
26.2.2019
I’ve always loved the flexibility of Objects and prototypes in JavaScript, but for a long time, I felt that a level of dynamism was lacking. JavaScript eventually added get and set methods for object properties, which was an awesome step, but there was still room for improvement....
The Magic of React-Based Multi-Step Forms
15.2.2019
One way to deal with long, complex forms is to break them up into multiple steps. You know, answer one set of questions, move on to another, then maybe another, and so on and so forth. We often refer to these as multi-step forms (for obvious reasons), but others also take to calling it a “wizard”...
Front and Rear Camera Access with JavaScript's getUserMedia()
13.2.2019
It seems like not so long ago every browser had the Flash plugin to get access to the devices media hardware to capture audio and video, with the help of these plugins, developers were able to get
Quick! What’s the Difference Between Flexbox and Grid?
12.2.2019
Let's go rapid fire and try to answer this question with quick points rather than long explanations. There are a lot of similarities between flexbox and grid, starting with the fact that they are used for layout and much more powerful than any layout technique that came before them. They...
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the JavaScript
12.2.2019
Around this time last year, I wrote an article about the JavaScript learning landscape. Within that article, you’ll find my grand plans to learn JavaScript — complete with a link to a CodePen Collection I started for tracking my progress, and it even got dozens of comments cheering me on.
Like most...
The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript Algorithms: Anagrams
12.2.2019
Hooray! This article marks the last string manipulation challenge in this section of this course. We've come a long way!
More Like position: tricky;
4.2.2019
I rather like position: sticky;. It has practical use cases. I think of things like keeping a table of contents in a sidebar of a long article, but as a fairly simple implementation and without risk of overlapping things in awkward ways. But Elad Shechter is right here: it's not used that much...
How Well Do You Know CSS Layout?
15.1.2019
The difference between a CSS good experience and a long frustrating one is oftentimes a matter of a few small details. CSS is indeed nuanced. One of the most common areas where I see struggles is layout. Personally, I like to study patterns. I notice that I tend to use a small group of patterns...
JavaScript Labels
15.1.2019
No matter how long you’ve been a JavaScript developer, there will always be language features that you didn’t know about until you saw them in a fringe piece of code. Your reaction generally is a bit like: One of those features I see developers quizically trying to figure out...
An Initial Implementation of clip-path: path();
24.12.2018
One thing that has long surprised (and saddened) me is that the clip-path property, as awesome as it is, only takes a few values. The circle() and ellipse() functions are nice, but hiding overflows and rounding with border-radius generally helps there already. Perhaps the most useful value...
Force Download with JavaScript
24.12.2018
Force download scripts have been an important part of internet usability for a long time.  I can attest to that by the number of times I’ve implemented this feature on the server side and the popularity of my PHP Force Download post, even to this day.  With the web world having...
The Fragmented, But Evolving State of CSS-in-JS
20.12.2018
TLDR: The CSS-in-JS community has converged on a consistent API.
Not so long ago, a Facebook engineer compiled a list of the available CSS-in-JS methodologies. It wasn’t short:
aphrodite, babel-plugin-css-in-js, babel-plugin-pre-style, bloody-react-styled, classy, csjs, css-constructor, css-light...
Google Fonts and font-display
19.12.2018
The font-display descriptor in @font-face blocks is really great. It goes a long way, all by itself, for improving the perceived performance of web font loading. Loading web fonts is tricky stuff and having a tool like this that works as well as it does is a big deal for the web.
It's such a...