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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...
Technical Debt is Like Tetris
21.3.2019
Here’s a wonderful post by Eric Higgins all about refactoring and technical debt. He compares giant refactoring projects to being similar to Tetris:
Similar to running a business, Tetris gets harder the longer you play. Pieces move faster and it becomes harder to keep up.
Similar to running...
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...
See No Evil: Hidden Content and Accessibility
15.3.2019
There is no one true way to hide something on the web. Nor should there be, because hiding is too vague. Are you hiding visually or temporarily (like a user menu), but the content should still be accessible? Are you hiding it from assistive tech on purpose? Are you showing it to assistive tech...
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...
Smooth Scrolling for Screencasts
13.3.2019
Let's say you wanted to scroll a web page from top to bottom programmatically. For example, you're recording a screencast and want a nice full-page scroll. You probably can't scroll it yourself because it'll be all uneven and jerky. Native JavaScript can do smooth scrolling. Here's a tiny snippet...
Application Holotypes
13.3.2019
It's entirely too common to make broad-sweeping statements about all websites. Jason Miller:
We often make generalizations about applications we see in the wild, both anecdotal and statistical: "Single-Page Applications are slower than multipage" or "apps with low TTI loaded fast". However,...
Downsides of Smooth Scrolling
11.3.2019
Smooth scrolling has gotten a lot easier. If you want it all the time on your page, and you are happy letting the browser deal with the duration for you, it's a single line of CSS:
html {
scroll-behavior: smooth;
}
I tried this on version 17 of this site, and it was the second most-hated thing...
Get Started with Node: An Introduction to APIs, HTTP and ES6+ JavaScript
11.3.2019
Jamie Corkhill has written this wonderful post about Node and I think it’s perhaps one of the best technical articles I’ve ever read. Not only is it jam-packed with information for folks like me who aren't writing JavaScript everyday, it is also incredibly deliberate as Jamie slowly walks through...
console.log() Faster with Turbo Console Log
11.3.2019
I've recently been live-coding on Twitch and the thing that I've loved about it is all the users in the chat that are helping me out by giving me the
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...
5 Ways to Get the Most Out of a Crypto Event
8.3.2019
The young blockchain industry is facing rapid growth through research, blockchain summits, conferences, and networking events. These conferences come in all forms, shapes, and sizes. The crypto world is changing at a faster rate and it is important to keep […]
The post 5 Ways to Get the Most...
Extracting Text from Content Using HTML Slot, HTML Template and Shadow DOM
6.3.2019
Chapter names in books, quotes from a speech, keywords in an article, stats on a report — these are all types of content that could be helpful to isolate and turn into a high-level summary of what's important.
For example, have you seen the way Business Insider provides an article's key points...
The Client/Server Rendering Spectrum
6.3.2019
I've definitely been guilty of thinking about rendering on the web as a two-horse race. There is Server-Side Rendering (SSR, like this WordPress site is doing) and Client-Side Rendering (CSR, like a typical React app). Both are full of advantages and disadvantages. But, of course, the conversation...
Why I Write CSS in JavaScript
5.3.2019
I'm never going to tell you that writing your CSS in CSS (or some syntactic preprocessor) is a bad idea. I think you can be perfectly productive and performant without any tooling at all. But, I also think writing CSS in JavaScript is a good idea for component-based styles in codebases that build...
CSS Remedy
4.3.2019
There is a 15-year history of CSS resets. In fact, a "reset" isn't really the right word. Tantek Çelik's take in 2004 was called "undohtml.css" and it wasn't until a few years later when Eric Meyer called his version a reset, that the word became the default term. When Normalize came around,...
A Bit of Performance
28.2.2019
Here’s a great post by Roman Komarov on what he learned by improving the performance of his personal website. There’s a couple of neat things he does to tackle font loading in particular, such as adding the <link rel="preload"> tags for fonts. This will encourage those font files...
Six tips for better web typography
27.2.2019
How do we avoid the most common mistakes when it comes to setting type on the web? That’s the question that’s been stuck in my head lately as I’ve noticed a lot of typography that’s lackluster, frustrating, and difficult to read. So, how can we improve interfaces so that our content is easy to read...
What We Want from Grid
27.2.2019
We felt spoiled with CSS grid for a minute there. It arrived hot and fast in all the major browsers all at once. Now that we're seeing a lot more usage, we're seeing people want more from grid.
Michelle Barker lists hers wants (and I'll put my commentary after):
Styling row and column gaps. I've...
iconsvg.xyz
25.2.2019
There is a lot to like about Gaddafi Rusli's ICONSVG.
It provides inline <svg>, which is the most generically useful way to deliver them, and probably how they should be used anyway. Each icon is a tiny amount of SVG and I'd bet they were all hand-golfed.
They are all stroke-based, so they...