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Care for the Text
24.12.2021
How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients! Illustrations! Colors to pack a punch! Vite! And, sure, all these things might make a website better. But …
Remember You Are Not the User
23.12.2021
One thing people can do to make their websites better is to remember that you are not representative of all your users. Our life experiences and how we interact with the web are not indicative of how everyone interacts with …
2021 Roundup of Web Research
23.12.2021
Last year, we kicked out a roundup of published surveys, research, and other findings from around the web. There were some nice nuggets in there, like a general sentiment that the web needs more documentation, Tailwind CSS dun …
Show, Don’t Tell
23.12.2021
How much time do you spend designing the content presentation for your websites? When you write a new blog post or create a new page, are you thinking about just the words, or how your readers will engage with those …
Personalize it!
23.12.2021
Ensuring accessibility is a clear path to making your website better. When you make your site accessible, you grow your audience, improve the experience for all people using it (not just those with accessibility needs), and you get SEO benefits…
Why Ember?
22.12.2021
There was a time when I’d write React, Angular, and Ember as a kind of generic grouping of three major JavaScript frameworks. And maybe just because three is a nice number, that became React, Vue, and Angular over time, thanks …
Increase Your Reach
22.12.2021
NGL, I was a little overwhelmed when I sat down to write this article. There are so many things that immediately flooded my mind—take out any extra divs; use links for URLs, use buttons for events and actions; use …
Links on Performance V
21.12.2021
Does shadow DOM improve style performance? — Nolan Lawson covers how, because of the inherent encapsulation of the shadow DOM, the styling gets applied a bit faster than it would if those styling rules were relevant to the entire page. But …
Make Joyful Things
21.12.2021
Everything kind of sucks right now. Things—generally—feel bad. Setting aside the broader realities of a global pandemic and rampant social injustices, we’re watching the identity of the web platform, an intrinsically free and open medium of creative expression, co-opted for …
Auto Dark Theme
20.12.2021
There are a number of ways to approach a dark mode for your website, but essentially you get all the styles ready for it and then apply them when the user has indicated they want them, whether by direct …
Build Great Apps: Designer and Developer Collaboration Just Got Easier
20.12.2021
(This is a sponsored post.)
We’re going to go over details on how designer ↔️ developer collaboration in AWS Amplify Studio can make app building easier, but let’s cover one of those things right at the top here.
Say …
Be Prepared for Failure and Handle it Gracefully
20.12.2021
When I was working at my first “real” job in the field in the mid-2000s, it was hammered in the web dev field to build tiny websites (no more than 100KB per page), only use JavaScript for special effects, and …
A visual introduction to machine learning
17.12.2021
Just the first sentence alone here from Stepanie Yee and Tony Chu is solid:
In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.
And what …
Maybe Nothing
17.12.2021
What’s one thing we can do to make our site better? Maybe nothing at all!
Our websites keep getting bigger and bigger! When we have a team with so many exciting ideas and such interesting technology, it can be easy …
The surprising behavior of !important in CSS custom property values
17.12.2021
Huh! I did not realize that CSS custom properties had their own resolution behavior for how !important works in their values. Uh, despite writing a guide about them. 😬 But hey it’s now updated.
Stefan Judis documents it clearly. …
Consistent, Fluidly Scaling Type and Spacing
16.12.2021
When Chris first sent me this prompt, I was thinking about writing about progressive enhancement, but that subject is so wide-reaching to be one thing and all too predictable, especially for those already familiar with my writing. Saying that, what …
Topological sort
16.12.2021
Jordan Scales explores the computer science concept of topological sorting, and what it might look like if applied to the concept of z-index in CSS. So, you don’t express what the z-index should be directly; instead, you say exactly …
HTML Sanitizer API
16.12.2021
Three cheers for (draft stage) progress on a Sanitizer API! It’s gospel that you can’t trust user input. And indeed, any app I’ve ever worked on has dealt with bad actors trying to slip in and execute nefarious code …
Working With Web Feeds: It’s More Than RSS
16.12.2021
Between Google Chrome experimenting with “following” sites, along with a growing frustration of how social media platforms limit a creator’s reach to their fans through algorithmic feeds, there’s been renewed interest in RSS feeds and they’re primed for a …
Maybe there kinda is background-opacity?
15.12.2021
I was reading Jake’s “Cross-fading any two DOM elements is currently impossible” which is a wonderfully nerdy deep dive into how there is no real way to literally cross-fade elements. Yeah, you can animate both of their opacities, but even …