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STAR Apps: A New Generation of Front-End Tooling for Development Workflows
18.1.2019
Product teams from AirBnb and New York Times to Shopify and Artsy (among many others) are converging on a new set of best practices and technologies for building the web apps that their businesses depend on. This trend reflects core principles and solve underlying problems that we may share, so...
Intro to React Hooks
18.1.2019
Hooks make it possible to organize logic in components, making them tiny and reusable without writing a class. In a sense, they’re React’s way of leaning into functions because, before them, we’d have to write them in a component and, while components have proven to be powerful and functional...
Does it mutate?
18.1.2019
This little site by Remy Sharp's makes it clear whether or not a JavaScript method changes the original array (aka mutates) or not.
I was actually bitten by this the other day. I needed the last element from an array, so I remembered .pop() and used it.
const arr = ["doe", "ray", "mee"];
const...
Angular, Autoprefixer, IE11, and CSS Grid Walk into a Bar…
18.1.2019
I am attracted to the idea that you shouldn't care how the code you author ends up in the browser. It's already minified. It's already gzipped. It's already transmogrified (real word!) by things that polyfill it, things that convert it into code that older browsers understand, things that make...
2019 CSS Wishlist
17.1.2019
What do you wish CSS could do natively that it can't do now? First, let's review the last time we did this in 2013.
❌ "I'd like to be able to select an element based on if it contains another particular selector"
❌ "I'd like to be able to select an element based on the content...
Create Smart WordPress Forms in Less Than 5 Minutes with WPForms
17.1.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Most online form solutions are either too complex or too expensive.
We believe you shouldn't have to spend hours creating online forms for your business. That's why we built WPForms, a drag and drop WordPress form builder that's both EASY and POWERFUL.
WPForms allows...
How I Built a GPS-Powered Weather Clock With My Old iPhone 4
17.1.2019
My first smartphone was an iPhone 4s. I remember the excitement of exploring its capabilities at a time when it was the coolest thing around. Eventually, of course, I replaced it with a newer model and the old iPhone, still in mint condition, gathered dust for two years. What a waste!
But was...
How I’ve Been Using Notion Personally and Professionally
16.1.2019
I use Notion quite a bit, both personally and professionally.
In a sense, it's just an app for keeping documents in one place: little notes, to-do lists, basic spreadsheets, etc. I like the native macOS Notes app just fine. It's quick and easy, it's desktop and mobile, it syncs... but there...
Making Movies With amCharts
16.1.2019
In this article, I want to show off the flexibility and real power of amCharts 4. We’re going to learn how to combine multiple charts that run together with animations that form a movie experience. Even if you’re only interested in creating a different kind of animation that has nothing to do with...
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...
CSS doesn’t suck
15.1.2019
I'm not so protective of CSS that I'm above hearing it criticized, but I'm certainly in agreement here. CSS does not suck. I love how the post is framed to hype up current CSS features the way features of other languages and tools are hyped:
Imagine if a tech dude walked on stage at a conference...
In Defense of Utility-First CSS
15.1.2019
A rather full-throated argument (or rather, response to arguments against) utility (atomic) CSS from Sarah Dayan. I wondered recently if redesigns were potentially a weakness of these types of systems (an awful lot of tearing down classes) which Sarah acknowledges and recommends more abstraction...
SVG Filters 101
15.1.2019
The first article in a series on SVG filters. This guide will help you understand what they are and show you how to use them to create your own visual effects.
SVG Filters 101 was written by Sara Soueidan and published on Codrops
Using React Portals to Render Children Outside the DOM Hierarchy
15.1.2019
Say we need to render a child element into a React application. Easy right? That child is mounted to the nearest DOM element and rendered inside of it as a result.
render() {
return (
<div>
// Child to render inside of the div
</div>
);
}
But! What if we want...
Design v17
14.1.2019
We rolled out a new site design on January 1! This is the 17th version of CSS-Tricks if you can believe that. The versions tend to evolve a decent amount beyond the initial launch, but we archive screenshots on this design history page. Like I said in our 2018 thank you post:
This is easily...
The Ethics of Web Performance
14.1.2019
Tim Kadlec on the issues surrounding poor web performance and why it’s so important for us to care about making our sites as fast as possible:
Poor performance can, and does, lead to exclusion. This point is extremely well documented by now, but warrants repeating. Sites that use an excess...
Slice and Dice a Disc with CSS
13.1.2019
I recently came across an interesting sliced disc design. The disc had a diagonal gradient and was split into horizontal slices, offset a bit from left to right. Naturally, I started to think what would the most efficient way of doing it with CSS be.
Sliced gradient disc.
The first thought...
Re: Pleasing Color Palettes
11.1.2019
There are so many tools out there to help you pick colors. I totally get it! It's hard! When colors are done well, it's like magic. It adds a level of polish to a design that can really set it apart.
Let's look at some, then talk about this idea some more.
Here's one I just saw called Color...
Piecing Together Approaches for a CSS Masonry Layout
11.1.2019
Masonry layout, on the web, is when items of an uneven size are laid out such that there aren't uneven gaps. I would guess the term was coined (or at least popularized) for the web by David DeSandro because of his popular Masonry JavaScript library, which has been around since 2010.
JavaScript...
Why we need CSS subgrid
11.1.2019
I’m a huge fan of CSS Grid and I use it on pretty much every project these days. However, there’s one part of it that makes things much more complicated than they really ought to be: the lack of subgrids. And in this post on the matter, Ken Bellows explains why they’d be so gosh darn useful:
But...