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All About mailto: Links
22.3.2019
You can make a garden variety anchor link (<a>) open up a new email. Let's take a little journey into this feature. It's pretty easy to use, but as with anything web, there are lots of things to consider.
The basic functionality
<a href="mailto:someone@yoursite.com">Email...
Using <details> for Menus and Dialogs is an Interesting Idea
21.3.2019
One of the most empowering things you can learn as a new front-end developer who is starting to learn JavaScript is to change classes. If you can change classes, you can use your CSS skills to control a lot on a page. Toggle a class to one thing, style it this way, toggle to another class...
It’s pretty cool how Netlify CMS works with any flat file site generator
21.3.2019
Little confession here: when I first saw Netlify CMS at a glance, I thought: cool, maybe I'll try that someday when I'm exploring CMSs for a new project. Then as I looked at it with fresh eyes: I can already use this! It's a true CMS in that it adds a content management UI on top of any static site...
Some Notes About Accessibility
20.3.2019
Earlier this month Eric Bailey wrote about the current state of accessibility on the web and why it felt like fighting an uphill battle:
As someone with a good deal of interest in the digital accessibility space, I follow WebAIM’s work closely. Their survey results are priceless insights into...
Chrome Lite Pages
19.3.2019
The Chrome team announced a new feature called Lite Pages that can be activated by flipping on the Data Saver option on an Android device:
Chrome on Android’s Data Saver feature helps by automatically optimizing web pages to make them load faster. When users are facing network or data constraints...
Using Local with Flywheel
19.3.2019
Have you seen Local by Flywheel? It's a native app for helping set up local WordPress developer environments. I absolutely love it and use it to do all my local WordPress development work. It brings a lovingly designed GUI to highly technical tasks in a way that I think works very well. Plus...
Crafting Reusable HTML Templates
19.3.2019
In our last article, we discussed the Web Components specifications (custom elements, shadow DOM, and HTML templates) at a high-level. In this article, and the three to follow, we will put these technologies to the test and examine them in greater detail and see how we can use them in production...
React Starter: React Popularity and When Not to Use React
18.3.2019
There are many big reasons for why React has become so popular. Let's examine how popular React is, what people like about it, and when we should/shouldn't use React.
Main Benefits of React
Web Standards Meet User-Land: Using CSS-in-JS to Style Custom Elements
15.3.2019
The popularity of CSS-in-JS has mostly come from the React community, and indeed many CSS-in-JS libraries are React-specific. However, Emotion, the most popular library in terms of npm downloads, is framework agnostic.
Using the shadow DOM is common when creating custom elements, but there’s...
The Dark Side of the Grid
10.3.2019
Manuel Matuzovic makes the point that in order to use CSS grid in some fairly simple markup scenarios, we might be tempted to flatten our HTML to make sure all the elements we need to can participate on the grid. What we need is subgrid and non-buggy display: contents;, so I'd like to think in...
Using React Loadable for Code Splitting by Components and Routes
7.3.2019
In a bid to have web applications serve needs for different types of users, it’s likely that more code is required than it would be for one type of user so the app can handle and adapt to different scenarios and use cases, which lead to new features and functionalities. When this happens, it’s...
Mask Compositing: The Crash Course
2.3.2019
At the start of 2018, as I was starting to go a bit deeper into CSS gradient masking in order to create interesting visuals one would think are impossible otherwise with just a single element and a tiny bit of CSS, I learned about a property that had previously been completely unknown to...
Do CSS Custom Properties Beat Sass Loops?
2.3.2019
I reckon that a lot of our uses of Sass maps can be replaced with CSS Custom properties – but hear me out for a sec.
When designing components we often need to use the same structure of a component but change its background or text color based on a theme. For example, in an alert, we might need...
Should I Use Source Maps in Production?
1.3.2019
It's a valid question. A "source map" is a special file that connects a minified/uglified version of an asset (CSS or JavaScript) to the original authored version. Say you've got a filed called _header.scss that gets imported into global.scss which is compiled to global.css. That final CSS file...
Get File MIME Type from Command Line
28.2.2019
I’ve gotten skilled at shell scripting over the years. I love a good GUI but knowing how to automate makes you a much more powerful engineer. Much of my scripting requires recursing over directories and processing a file if it meets a given criteria, which is often file extension or MIME...
WorldWideWeb
27.2.2019
For the 30th anniversary of the web, CERN brought nine web nerds together to recreate the very first web browser — Or a working replication of it anyway, as you use it from your web browser, inception style.
Well done, Mark Boulton, John Allsopp, Kimberly Blessing, Jeremy Keith, Remy Sharp...
Text Wrapping & Inline Pseudo Elements
27.2.2019
I love posts like this. It's just about adding a little icon to the end of certain links, but it ends up touching on a million things along the way. I think this is an example of why some people find front-end fun and some people rather dislike it.
Things involved:
Cool [attribute] selectors that...
Typography for Developers
27.2.2019
This is intended as a practical guide for developers to learn web typography. We’ll cover a range of practical and useful topics, like how to choose and use custom fonts on the web, but more importantly, how to lay text out to create a pleasant user experience. We’ll go over the principles...
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...
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...