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Additive Animations in CSS
3.11.2020
Daniel C. Wilson explains how with CSS @keyframe animations, when multiple of them are applied to an element, they do both work. But if any properties are repeated, only the last one works. They override each other. I’ve seen this limitation overcome by applying keyframes to nested elements...
Websites We Like: Whimsical
3.11.2020
Whimsical is an app that lets you create flowcharts, wireframes, and mind maps but it was only earlier today that I spotted just how great the website is — especially the product pages. Check out this page where they describe how to use the Mind Maps feature where you can use the product right...
GIFS and prefers-reduced-motion
3.11.2020
The <picture> element has a trick it can do where it shows different image formats in different situations. If all you are interested in is formats for the sake of performance, maybe you’d do:
<picture<source srcset="img/waterfall.avif" type="image/avif"<source...
Gray Burst
3.11.2020
I made this neat little gray burst thing. It’s nothing particularly special, especially compared to the amazing creativity on CodePen, but I figured I could document some of the things happening in it for learning reasons.
CodePen Embed Fallback
It’s SVG
SVG has <line x1 y1...
How to Automate Project Versioning and Releases with Continuous Deployment
2.11.2020
Having a semantically versioned software will help you easily maintain and communicate changes in your software. Doing this is not easy. Even after manually merging the PR, tagging the commit, and pushing the release, you still have to write release notes. There are a lot of different steps,...
compute cuter
30.10.2020
Get that desk more cuter, fam. Amy (@sailorhg) has this perfectly cute minisite with assorted desktop backgrounds, fonts, editor themes, keyboard stuff, and other accessories. These rainbow cables are great.
And speaking of fonts, we’re still plucking away at this microsite for coding fonts...
Little Things on My Personal Site
30.10.2020
I updated my personal website the other day. Always a fun project since it’s one of the few where it’s 100% just me. It’s my own personal playground with no other goal than making the site represent me to have a little fun. It’s not a complete re-write, just some new paint....
In Defense of Tables and Floats in Modern Day Development
30.10.2020
Twenty-plus years ago, tables were the main way web pages were created in HTML. It gave web builders consistent control of constructing pages with some “design.” No longer did sites only have to be top-to-bottom in a linear manner — they could be set up with columns that align left-to-right...
Using Your Own Design System with KendoReact Components
30.10.2020
Maybe you’ve already heard of (or even worked with!) KendoReact. It’s popped up in some of my day-to-day conversations, especially those about working with design systems and React. You could think of it as a component library like Bootstrap or Material Design, except the components...
The CSS Custom Property Toggle Trick
29.10.2020
Back in July 2020, I got an email from James0x57 (I always try to refer to people by their name, but I think I get the sense they prefer to go by screen name) that says:
The entire world of branching conditional logic and bulk feature toggling for custom CSS properties is possible and only exists...
More on content-visibility
28.10.2020
Back in August 2020, when the content-visiblity property in CSS trickled its way into Chrome browsers, Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin wrote about it and we covered it. The weirdest part is that to get the performance value out of it, you pair it with contain-intrinsic-size on these big chunks...
Comparing Static Site Generator Build Times
28.10.2020
There are so many static site generators (SSGs). It’s overwhelming trying to decide where to start. While an abundance of helpful articles may help wade through the (popular) options, they don’t magically make the decision easy.
I’ve been on a quest to help make that decision easier. A colleague...
Comparing Various Ways to Hide Things in CSS
27.10.2020
You would think that hiding content with CSS is a straightforward and solved problem, but there are multiple solutions, each one being unique.
Developers most commonly use display: none to hide the content on the page. Unfortunately, this way of hiding content isn’t bulletproof because now that...
Anima 4.0: Go Straight From Design to React in the Design Handoff
27.10.2020
Imagine this scenario: You get an email from the design team. It contains a link to a high-fidelity prototype of a React app they want you to build. You click the link and get ready to inspect the work only to find… the components have already been built.
Huh?
It might sound like a dream...
Core Web Vital Tooling
26.10.2020
I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make stuff smaller! And while those are all very related to web performance, they are abstractly related. Actual web performance to users are things...
WordPress and Jamstack
26.10.2020
I recently moderated a panel at Netlify’s virtual Jamstack Conf that included Netlify CEO Matt Biilman and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. The whole thing was built up — at least to some — as a “Jamstack vs. WordPress” showdown.
I have lots of thoughts of my own on this...
Creating CSS Shapes with Emoji
24.10.2020
CSS Shapes is a standard that lets us create geometric shapes over floated elements that cause the inline contents — usually text — around those elements to wrap along the specified shapes.
Such a shaped flow of text looks good in editorial designs or designs that work with text-heavy contents...
CSS in 3D: Learning to Think in Cubes Instead of Boxes
23.10.2020
My path to learning CSS was a little unorthodox. I didn’t start as a front-end developer. I was a Java developer. In fact, my earliest recollections of CSS were picking colors for things in Visual Studio.
It wasn’t until later that I got to tackle and find my love for the front end....
Create an FAQ Slack app with Netlify functions and FaunaDB
22.10.2020
Sometimes, when you’re looking for a quick answer, it’s really useful to have an FAQ system in place, rather than waiting for someone to respond to a question. Wouldn’t it be great if Slack could just answer these FAQs for us? In this tutorial, we’re going to be making just that: a slash command...
A Primer on the Different Types of Browser Storage
21.10.2020
In back-end development, storage is a common part of the job. Application data is stored in databases, files in object storage, transient data in caches… there are seemingly endless possibilities for storing any sort of data. But data storage isn’t limited only to the back end. The front end (the...