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Chapter 2: Browsers
12.8.2020
Previously in web history…
Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates the technologies behind the web — HTML, HTTP, and the URL which blend hypertext with the Internet — with a small team at CERN. He convinces the higher-ups in the organizations to put the web in the public domain so anyone can...
Practical Use Cases for JavaScript’s closest() Method
12.8.2020
Have you ever had the problem of finding the parent of a DOM node in JavaScript, but aren’t sure how many levels you have to traverse up to get to it? Let’s look at this HTML for instance:
<div data-id="123"<buttonClick me</button</div
That’s pretty straightforward, right? Say...
Halfmoon: A Bootstrap Alternative with Dark Mode Built In
11.8.2020
I recently launched the first production version of Halfmoon, a front-end framework that I have been building for the last few months. This is a short introductory post about what the framework is, and why I decided to build it.
The elevator pitch
Halfmoon is a front-end framework with a...
Register for An Event Apart’s Front-End Focus Online Conference
11.8.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
An Event Apart has been doing these single-day online “Online together” conferences. You can check out the last couple, which are available on-demand (buy it, watch it when you want) for a limited time:
Online Together (available through December...
System UIcons
11.8.2020
This is a great collection of icons by Corey Ginnivan that’s both free and with no attribution required when you use them. The style is super simple. Each icon looks like older versions of the icons from macOS to me because they’re cute but not too cute.
Also? The icon picker UI is slick and looks...
Don’t Wait! Mock the API
10.8.2020
Today we have a loose coupling between the front end and the back end of web applications. They are usually developed by separate teams, and keeping those teams and the technology in sync is not easy. To solve part of this problem, we can “fake” the API server that the back end tech...
zerodivs.com
10.8.2020
Pretty neat little website from Joan Perals, inspired by stuff like Lynn’s A Single Div. With multiple hard-stop background-image gradients, you don’t need extra HTML elements to draw shapes — you can draw as many shapes as you want on a single element. There is even a stacking order...
Nailing the Perfect Contrast Between Light Text and a Background Image
7.8.2020
Have you ever come across a site where light text is sitting on a light background image? If you have, you’ll know how difficult that is to read. A popular way to avoid that is to use a transparent overlay. But this leads to an important question: Just how transparent should that overlay...
More Control Over CSS Borders With background-image
7.8.2020
You can make a typical CSS border dashed or dotted. For example:
.box {
border: 1px dashed black;
border: 3px dotted red;
}
You don’t have all that much control over how big or long the dashes or gaps are. And you certainly can’t give the dashes slants, fading, or animation!...
What does 100% mean in CSS?
7.8.2020
When using percentage values in CSS like this…
.element {
margin-top: 40%;
}
…what does that % value mean here? What is it a percentage of? There’ve been so many times when I’ll be using percentages and something weird happens. I typically shrug, change the value to something else...
Every Website is an Essay
7.8.2020
Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color...
font-weight: 300 considered harmful
7.8.2020
Tomáš Janoušek:
Many web pages these days set font-weight: 300 in their stylesheet. With DejaVu Sans as my preferred font, this results in very thin and light text that is hard to read, because for some reason the “DejaVu Sans ExtraLight” variant (weight 200) is being used...
HTML for Subheadings and Headings
6.8.2020
Let’s say you have a double heading situation going on. A little one on top of a big one. It comes up, I dunno, a billion times a day, I’d say. What HTML do you go for? Dare I say, it depends? But have you considered all the options? And how those options play out semantically...
JavaScript Fatigue
6.8.2020
From Nicholas Zakas’ newsletter, on how he avoids JavaScript fatigue:
 I don’t try to learn about every new thing that comes out. There’s a limited number of hours in the day and a limited amount of energy you can devote to any topic, so I choose not to learn about anything...
TypeScript, Minus TypeScript
6.8.2020
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last several years (and let’s face it, hiding under a rock sometimes feels like the right thing to do), you’ve probably heard of and likely used TypeScript. TypeScript is a syntactical superset of JavaScript that adds — as its name suggests — typing to...
Building Custom Data Importers: What Engineers Need to Know
6.8.2020
Importing data is a common pain-point for engineering teams. Whether its importing CRM data, inventory SKUs, or customer details, importing data into various applications and building a solution for this is a frustrating experience nearly every engineer can relate to. Data import, as a critical...
Warp SVG Online
6.8.2020
The warping is certainly the cool part here. Some fancy math literally transforms the path data to do the warping. But the UX detail work here is just as nice. Scrolling the page zooms in and out via a transform: scale() on the SVG wrapper (clever!). Likewise, holding the spacebar lets you...
Chapter 1: Birth
5.8.2020
Tim Berners-Lee is fascinated with information. It has been his life’s work. For over four decades, he has sought to understand how it is mapped and stored and transmitted. How it passes from person to person. How the seeds of information become the roots of dramatic change. It is so fundamental...
Computed Values: More Than Meets the Eye
5.8.2020
Browser DevTools are indispensable for us front end developers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Computed tab, a small corner of the DevTools panel that shows us big things, like how relative CSS values are resolved. We’ll also see how inheritance fits into the browser’s...
Orchid: Bringing Decentralization to VPNs
5.8.2020
Whenever we browse the web, read news online, or purchase a new pair of glasses from an e-commerce store, we leave traces. These traces sometimes show us content that actually provides us with value, but more often the information we leave is used in concerning ways with scandals like Cambridge...