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Pausing a GIF with details/summary
22.7.2020
Steve Faulkner has a clever idea here. You can show an (animated) GIF and overlay a pause/play button on top of it — which is really a <details>/<summary> element. When toggled, a (non-animated) JPG inside covers the GIF, effectively “pausing” it.
Adrian Roselli calls...
Open Prioritization
14.7.2020
Like Kickstarter, but for Web Platform Features.
That’s about the quickest way to sum up Open Prioritization from Igalia. Igalia is an independent company that works on browsers. They literally commit to all the different open source browsers to implement (and fix) features that we all use....
The Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS
25.6.2020
This was always my favorite thing in Mad magazine. One page (the inside of the back cover, I think) was covered in a zany illustration. You folded that page in thirds, covering up the middle-third of that image, and a new image would form because the illustration was designed to perfectly line...
Rough Notation
22.6.2020
This is a neat little library. It uses SVG to insert hand-drawn looking annotations to elements (probably text), like underlines and box highlights (there are 6 design options, all configurable). Super clever.
Here’s a little demo:
CodePen Embed Fallback
Aside from it just being cool,...
Building a hexagonal grid using CSS grid
18.6.2020
I think of grids as arrangements of rectangles with vertical and horizontal lines running through. And they are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still do clever things in how we place things on those grids and what we do with the elements afterwards.
In this demo by Jesse Breneman,...
Offscreen Text for Copy & Paste
15.5.2020
The relationship between HTML and CSS is special: mixing content via HTML with presentation from CSS to make an awesome presentation. Sometimes, however, you need to employ CSS tricks solely to enhance functionality. This could be one of those cases. When browsing through the Firefox DevTools...
Creating an Accessible Range Slider with CSS
7.5.2020
The accessibility trick is using <input type="range"> and wrestling it into shape with CSS rather than giving up and re-building it with divs or whatever and later forget about accessibility.
The most clever example uses an angled linear-gradient background making the input look like...
CSS-Only Marquee Effect
5.4.2020
You make sure the text is more than twice the width of the screen, then use negative translate animations to do the marquee movement.
You’ll probably want to aria-hidden all but one of them if you need to duplicate the text. Or, you could use a very clever CSS trick...
The Slideout Footer
5.3.2020
A fascinating new site called The Markup just launched. Tagline: Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech. Great work from Upstatement. The content looks amazing, but of course, around here we're always interested in the design and tech as well. There is loads to adore, from the clean...
Chameleonic Header
26.2.2020
Nice demo from Sebastiano Guerriero. When a fixed-position header moves from overlapping differently-colored backgrounds, the colors flop out to be appropriate for that background. Sebastiano's technique is very clever, involving multiple copies of the header within each section (where the copies...
Listen to your web pages
16.2.2020
A clever idea from Tom Hicks combining MutationObserver (which can "observe" changes to elements like when their attributes, text, or children change) and the Web Audio API for creating sounds. Plop this code into the console on a page where you'd like to listen to essentially any DOM change...
Smaller HTML Payloads with Service Workers
31.1.2020
Short story: Philip Walton has a clever idea for using service workers to cache the top and bottom of HTML files, reducing a lot of network weight.
Longer thoughts: When you're building a really simple website, you can get away with literally writing raw HTML. It doesn't take long to need a...
7 Uses for CSS Custom Properties
27.12.2019
I find all seven of these quite clever and useful.
I particularly like using custom properties when you can sneak a variation into a place where you'd normally have to re-declare a whole big chunk of code.
.some-element {
background-color: hsla(
var(--h, 120),
var(--s, 50),
var(--l...
[aktualita] Brněnská Solitea kupuje český Clever Decision a slovinský MIT informatika
18.12.2019
Brněnský IT holding Solitea před Vánoci dokončila další dvě akvizice. Prostřednictvím své společnosti Saop získal stoprocentní podíl ve slovinském podniku MIT informatika, díky čemuž se má Solitea stát největším výrobcem podnikových informačních systémů ve výrobním sektoru na Slovinsku. „Zatímco...
Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems
17.12.2019
A clever idea from Matthew Ström:
[...] design APIs don’t seem like a stretch of the imagination. An API-driven approach is the natural extension of the work currently being done on design systems, including tokens and standardization projects.
If you buy into the idea of design tokens, that...
lite-youtube-embed
13.12.2019
A standard copy-and-paste YouTube embed lands on your page as an <iframe> which loads a big ol' pile of other stuff to play that video. But the UX of it is still essentially an image and a play button. Click the play button and the video plays. You can build essentially the same thing with...
iOS 13 Broke the Classic Pure CSS Parallax Technique
27.11.2019
I know. You hate parallax. You know what we should hate more? When things that used to work on the web stop working without any clear warning or idea why.
Way back in 2014, Keith Clark blogged an exceptionally clever CSS trick where you essentially use a CSS transform to scale an element down...
Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer
7.10.2019
Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser’s video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don’t detect them, you have to be clever...
Bankers Start to Recognize Bitcoin’s Role in Financial Evolution
29.9.2019
Digitization, disruption, blockchain, and frictionless payments. It’s amazing how prominent figures from the financial elite can provide a pretty detailed description of decentralized money without uttering “bitcoin” or “crypto.” But the fact of the matter is that...
A Color Picker for Product Images
17.9.2019
Sounds kind of like a hard problem doesn't it? We often don't have product shots in thousands of colors, such that we can flip out the <img src="product-red.jpg" alt="red product"> with <img src="product-blue.jpg" alt="blue product">. Nor do we typically have products in a vector...