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The peculiar magic of flexbox and auto margins
27.7.2018
In front-end development, there are often times when I know that I don’t know something. I might know enough to know what CSS to search for, but I have absolutely no idea how to use it or what the right syntax is. Somehow, in my head, there appears to be a filing cabinet that’s entirely empty,...
Stuff you can do with CSS pointer events
27.7.2018
Martijn Cuppens (the same fella with the very weird div!) has some more irresistible CSS trickery. Three of the examples are about making a child element trigger an event on a parent element (almost like the magic that is :focus-within).
Here's how I reasoned it out to myself:
You know how if...
Sometimes `sizes` is quite important.
27.7.2018
Paraphrased question from email:
I just read your article Responsive Images: If you’re just changing resolutions, use srcset. In the age of "responsive websites," srcset does not help in certain situations. For example, I have a popular products slider. On mobile, I have one image per slide where...
Teaching Your Clients How to Use The Website You Built Them
27.7.2018
I share my own thoughts on how you might go about educating someone you just built a site for. But it turns out I had a lot of fun putting together a ton of other people's thoughts as well. I tweeted about it and got a flood of responses, so this article is an amalgamation of all that.
Direct...
Recent Videos!
27.7.2018
I've recorded a decent number of videos lately, most of which are pairing with someone and digging into a topic as I glean as much information as I can! Several of these are sponsored, in that they are a part of an advertising package. Hopefully, you know me well enough that I don't work with...
Solved with CSS! Logical Styling Based on the Number of Given Elements
26.7.2018
This post is the third in a series about the power of CSS.
Article Series:
Colorizing SVG Backgrounds
Dropdown Menus
Logical Styling Based On the Number of Given Elements (this post)
Did you know that CSS is Turing complete? Did you know that you can use it to do some pretty serious logical...
Visual. Intuitive. Unlike Anything Else.
26.7.2018
(This is a sponsored post.)
monday.com is a team management tool that’s found favor with more than 34,000 teams, including teams of two to teams of 2,000+, teams working for startups, and teams working on projects for Fortune 500 companies like AOL, Adidas, Samsung, and the Discovery Channel...
Build a state management system with vanilla JavaScript
25.7.2018
Managing state is not a new thing in software, but it’s still relatively new for building software in JavaScript. Traditionally, we’d keep state within the DOM itself or even assign it to a global object in the window. Now though, we’re spoiled with choices for libraries and frameworks to help...
Did you know that style and script tags can be set to display: block?
25.7.2018
The other night, Amit Patel mentioned that you can set script tags in HTML to display: block with CSS and then edit that code inline with the contentEditable attribute. This means that you can then see it all update live in the browser as you type. Shortly after, Marius Gundersen replied that...
Finite State Machines with React
24.7.2018
As JavaScript applications on the web have grown more complex, so too has the complexity of dealing with state in those applications — state being the aggregate of all the data that an application needs to perform its function. Over the last several years, there has been a ton of great...
Developer Roadmaps
23.7.2018
The path to becoming a front-end developer, as looked back upon by anyone who self-identifies that way, is likely a very windy one full of thorn bushes and band websites. Still, documenting a path, even if it's straighter and far cleaner than reality, is an interesting exercise and might just...
View Source
23.7.2018
I remember seeing this Tom Dale tweet a while back. It's literally about the browser's ability to look at the HTML of the document you're looking at as it first arrived. Now the tweet is stirring up a new round of conversation.
Jonathan Snook has kind of a baby bear take:
We have the ability...
Adding Particle Effects to DOM Elements with Canvas
23.7.2018
Let’s take a look at how to make web pages more visually capable by combining the freedom of <canvas> with HTML elements. Specifically, we will be creating a basic HTML-to-particle effect, but the same technique could be used for many kinds of effects.
Before we begin, feel free to grab...
Your Body Text is Too Small
21.7.2018
Several years ago, there was a big push by designers to increase the font-size of websites and I feel like we’re living in another era of accessibility improvements where a fresh batch of designers are pushing for even larger text sizing today. Take this post by Christian Miller, for example, where...
Font Playground
20.7.2018
This is a wondrous little project by Wenting Zhang that showcases a series of variable fonts and lets you manipulate their settings to see the results. It’s interesting that there’s so many tools like this that have been released over the past couple of months, such as v-fonts, Axis-Praxis...
Weird things variable fonts can do
20.7.2018
I tend to think of variable fonts as a font format in which a single font file is capable of displaying type at near-infinite variations of things like boldness, width, and slantyness. In my experience, that's a common use case. Just check out many of the interactive demos over...
Building “Renderless” Vue Components
20.7.2018
There's this popular analogy of Vue that goes like this: Vue is what you get when React and Angular come together and make a baby. I've always shared this feeling. With Vue’s small learning curve, it's no wonder so many people love it. Since Vue tries to give the developer power over components...
CSS: A New Kind of JavaScript
19.7.2018
In this wacky and satirical post, Heydon Pickering describes a wild new technology called Cascading Style Sheets that solves a lot of the problems you might bump into when styling things with JavaScript:
A good sign that a technology is not fit for purpose is how much we have to rely on workarounds...
Accessibility for Teams
19.7.2018
Maya Benari:
Accessibility is a crucial part of government product design. First, it’s the law. Federal agencies face legal consequences when they don’t meet accessibility requirements. Second, it affects us all. Whether you have a motor disability, you sprained your wrist playing dodgeball,...
How to make a modern dashboard with NVD3.js
19.7.2018
NVD3.js is a JavaScript visualization library that is free to use and open source. It’s derived from the well-known d3.js visualization library. When used the right way, this library can be extremely powerful for everyday tasks and even business operations.
For example, an online dashboard. We...