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Building Multi-Directional Layouts
23.1.2020
There are some new features in CSS that can assist us with building layouts for different directions and languages with ease. This article is about CSS logical properties and values (e.g. margin-inline-start).  These are a W3C working draft that still going under heavy editing, but have...
Component-Level CMSs
23.1.2020
When a component lives in an environment where the data queries populating it live nearby, there is a pretty direct line between the visual component and the database where that exact content lives. That is opening up doors to site editing experiences that travel that line. We're starting to...
Amelia Wattenberger’s The CSS Cascade
23.1.2020
If you're on a small screen, remind yourself to check it out on a big screen when you have the chance.
Did you know that styles from an active transition beat !important rules, but styles from an active animation do not? I definitely did not.
Or that there are "origins" that are almost like...
Searching the Jamstack
22.1.2020
Here's Raymon Camden on adding site search functionality to a site that is statically hosted. A classic trick! Just shoot 'em to Google and scope the results to your site:
<form action="https://www.google.com/search" method="get"<input type="search" name="q"...
JAMstack vs. Jamstack
21.1.2020
It's just a word to evoke the idea that serving as much as you can statically while using client-side code and hitting serverless APIs for any needs after that.
The "official website" changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It's nothing...
positionstack
21.1.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
Say you have an address that your user typed in, like
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, USA
and now you need more information about it. Maybe you need the proper country code. Maybe you need the latitude and longitude. Maybe you need the postal code....
The Best Color Functions in CSS?
20.1.2020
I've said before that HSL is the best color format we have. Most of us aren't like David DeSandro, who can read hex codes. HSL(a) is Hue, Saturation, Lightness, and alpha, if we need it.
hsl(120, 100%, 40%)
Hue isn't intuitive, but it's not that weird. You take a trip around the color wheel from...
Getting Started with Front End Testing
20.1.2020
Amy Kapernick covers four types of testing that front-end devs could and should be doing:
Linting (There's ESLint for JavaScript and Stylelint or Prettier for CSS.)
Accessibility Testing (Amy recommends pa11y, and we've covered Axe.)
Visual Regression Testing (Amy recommends Backstop, and we've...
Timeless Web Dev Articles
18.1.2020
Pavithra Kodmad asked people for recommendations on what they thought were some of the most timeless articles about web development that have changed their perspective in some way. Fun! I'm gonna scour the thread and link up my favorites (that are actually articles, although not all of them...
The Design Squiggle
16.1.2020
I think we all have an intuitive understanding that, at the beginning of projects that require our creativity (be it design or code), things feel uncertain and messy. Then, as we go, things tend to straighten out. There is still some wiggling and setbacks, but by the end, we find a single solution...
A Web Component with Different HTML for Desktop and Mobile
16.1.2020
Christian Schaefer has a great big write-up about dealing with web advertisements. The whole thing is interesting, first documenting all the challenges that ads present, and then presenting modern solutions to each of them.
One code snippet that caught my eye was a simple way to design a component...
The Deal with the Section Element
15.1.2020
Two articles published the exact same day:
Bruce Lawson on Smashing Magazine: Why You Should Choose HTML5 <article> Over <section>
Adam Laki on Pine: The Difference Between <section> and <div> Element
They are comparing slightly different things, but they both...
Debunking the Myth: Accessibility and React
15.1.2020
I find it notable when the blog of a major accessibility-focused company like Deque publishes an article called Debunking the Myth: Accessibility and React. Mark Steadman is essentially saying if a site has bad accessibility, it ain't React... it's you. The tools are there to achieve good...
How many CSS properties are there?
15.1.2020
Tomasz Łakomy posted a joke tweet about naming all the CSS attributes and Tejas Kumar replied with a joke answer, going as far as making an npm module. You can even run a terminal command to see them:
npx get-all-css-properties
You'll get 259 of them. The source code uses the website quackit.com...
A Trick That Makes Drawing SVG Lines Way Easier
14.1.2020
When drawing lines with SVG, you often have a <path> element with a stroke. You set a stroke-dasharray that is as long as the path itself, as well as a stroke-offset that extends so far that you that it's initially hidden. Then you animate the stroke-offset back to 0 so you can watch...
Snowpack
14.1.2020
Snowpack. Love that name. This is the new thing from the Pika people, who are on to something. It's a bundler alternative, in a sense. It runs over packages you pull from npm to make sure that they are ES module-compatible (native imports).
This is how I digest it. When you write a line of code...
Collective #580
13.1.2020
React-three-fiber v4 * /uses * Goodbye, Clean Code * Aria Tablist * Theme UI Gallery
Collective #580 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Re-creating the ‘His Dark Materials’ Logo in CSS
11.1.2020
The text logo has a slash cut through the text. You set two copies on top of one another, cropping both of them with the clip-path property.
What's interesting to me is how many cool design effects require multiple copies of an element to do something cool. To get the extra copy, at least with...
CSS-Only Carousel
10.1.2020
It's kind of amazing how far HTML and CSS will take you when building a carousel/slideshow.
Setting some boxes in a horizontal row with flexbox is easy.
Showing only one box at a time with overflow and making it swipable with -webkit-overflow-scrolling is easy.
You can make the "slides" line...
Is it better to use ems/rems than px for font-size?
10.1.2020
The answer used to be absolutely yes because, if you used px units, you prevented the text from being resized by the user at all.
But browser zoom is the default method for making everything bigger (including text) these days and it works great even if you use px.
But... Kathleen McMahon really...