Search
Responsive Designs and CSS Custom Properties: Building a Flexible Grid System
26.2.2019
Last time, we looked at a few possible approaches for declaring and using CSS custom properties in responsive designs. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at CSS variables and how to use them in reusable components and modules. We will learn how to make our variables optional and set fallback...
Moving a Self-Hosted WordPress Site to WordPress.com
26.2.2019
I have a habit of getting some hosting when I need a new WordPress site. That is, a self-installed, self-hosted WordPress.org site. That's served me well over the years. I like my control. But along with that control comes a certain level of extra responsibility that sometimes just isn't worth...
iconsvg.xyz
25.2.2019
There is a lot to like about Gaddafi Rusli's ICONSVG.
It provides inline <svg>, which is the most generically useful way to deliver them, and probably how they should be used anyway. Each icon is a tiny amount of SVG and I'd bet they were all hand-golfed.
They are all stroke-based, so they...
Dealing with overflow and position: sticky;
25.2.2019
Any overflow value other than visible and no height is the enemy of child elements with position: sticky;. It's like that element is ready to stick when the parent scrolls, but it never does because the height is unconstrained. Adding a fixed height can solve the issue, but that's not always...
Responsive Designs and CSS Custom Properties: Defining Variables and Breakpoints
25.2.2019
CSS custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables) are becoming more and more popular. They finally reached decent browser support and are slowly making their way into various production environments. The popularity of custom properties shouldn’t come as a surprise, because they can be really helpful...
Using CSS Grid the right way
22.2.2019
Violet Peña has shared her recommendations for using CSS Grid. They basically boil down to these high-level points:
Use names instead of numbers for setting up our grid columns.
fr should be our flexible unit of choice.
We don’t really need a grid system anymore.
Although this is all great advice...
Writing Animations That Bring Your Site to Life
22.2.2019
Web animation is one of the factors that can strongly enhance your website’s look and feel. Sadly, unlike mobile apps, there aren’t as many websites using animation to their benefit as you would think. We don’t want to count yours among those, so this article is for you and anyone else looking...
Blobs!
21.2.2019
I was recently a guest editor for an issue of Bizarro Devs. It's a great newsletter! Go sign up! I put in a bunch of links around blobs. Like those weird squishy random shapes that are so "in" right now. Here are those links as well. I'm always a fan of publishing stuff I write ;)
Blobs! Blobs...
Deliver your best work with the help of monday.com
21.2.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Here's the situation: You've bashed out a complicated design over two weeks of near full-time effort, gotten everything down to the exact spec of the design file, turn it in for stakeholder review and... you're way off scope. Turns out a few folks on the team put their...
Deliver your best work with the help of monday.com
21.2.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Here's the situation: You've bashed out a complicated design over two weeks of near full-time effort, gotten everything down to the exact spec of the design file, turn it in for stakeholder review and... you're way off scope. Turns out a few folks on the team put their...
CSS Variables + calc() + rgb() = Enforcing High Contrast Colors
21.2.2019
As you may know, the recent updates and additions to CSS are extremely powerful. From Flexbox to Grid, and — what we’re concerned about here — Custom Properties (aka CSS variables), all of which make robust and dynamic layouts and interfaces easier than ever while opening up many other...
Colorful Typographic Experiments
21.2.2019
There have been some interesting, boundary-pushing typography-related experiments lately. I was trying to think of a joke like "somethings in the descenders" but I just can't find something that will stand on its own leg without being easy to counter.
Codrin Pavel created a fascinating multi-color...
<span>L</span><span>e</span><span>t</span><span>t</span><span>e</span><span>r</span><span>s</span>
20.2.2019
Did you see this Facebook crap?
"Why do I need a 4Ghz quadcore to run facebook?" This is why. A single word split up into 11 HTML DOM elements to avoid adblockers. pic.twitter.com/Zv4RfInrL0
— Mike Pan (@themikepan) February 6, 2019
I popped over to Facebook to verify that and what...
Diana Smith’s Top 5 CSS Properties She Uses to Produce CSS Art
20.2.2019
Have you seen Diana Smith's CSS drawings? Stunning. These far transcend the CSS drawings that sort of crudely replicate a flat SVG scene, like I might attempt. We were lucky enough for her to post some of her CSS drawing techniques here last year.
Well, Diana has also listed the top five...
Social Cards as a Service
19.2.2019
I love the idea of programmatically generated images. That power is close at hand these days for us front-end developers, thanks to the concept of headless browsers. Take Puppeteer, the library for controlling headless Chrome. Generating images from URLs is their default use case:
const puppeteer...
Don’t Get Clever with Login Forms
19.2.2019
Brad points out some UX problems with a variety of apps that are doing things a little outside of the norm when it comes to their login forms. There is already a bunch of things to get right with forms to begin with (e.g. use the right input types, label your inputs, don't have whack password...
How @supports Works
18.2.2019
CSS has a neat feature that allows us to test if the browser supports a particular property or property:value combination before applying a block of styles — like how a @media query matches when, say, the width of the browser window is narrower than some specified size and then the CSS within...
instant.page
18.2.2019
instant.page is a pretty cool project from Alexandre Dieulot. Alexandre has been at this idea for half a decade now, as InstantClick is his and is essentially the same exact idea.
The idea is that there is a significant delay between hovering over a link and clicking that link. Say it takes...
IE10-Compatible Grid Auto-Placement with Flexbox
18.2.2019
If you work on web applications that support older browsers, and have lusted after CSS Grid from the sidelines like I have, I have some good news: I've discovered a clever CSS-only way to use grid auto-placement in IE10+!
Now, it's not actually CSS Grid, but without looking at the code itself,...
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”...