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Automatic Social Share Images
29.12.2020
It’s a pretty low-effort thing to get a big fancy link preview on social media. Toss a handful of specific <meta> tags on a URL and you get a big image-title-description thing. Here’s Twitter’s version of an article on this …
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Chapter 6: Web Design
29.12.2020
Previously in web history…
After the first websites demonstrate the commercial and aesthetic potential of the web, the media industry floods the web with a surge of new content. Amateur webzines — which define and voice and tone unique to …
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Simulating Drop Shadows with the CSS Paint API
29.12.2020
Ask a hundred front-end developers, and most, if not all, of them will have used the box-shadow property in their careers. Shadows are enduringly popular, and can add an elegant, subtle effect if used properly. But shadows occupy a strange …
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Accessible SVG Icons
28.12.2020
The answer to “What is the most accessible HTML for an SVG icon?” isn’t one-size-fits all, because what an icon needs to do on a website varies. I’m partial to Heather Migliorisi’s research on all this, but I can summarize.…
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Create a Tag Cloud with some Simple CSS and even Simpler JavaScript
28.12.2020
I’ve always liked tag clouds. I like the UX of seeing what tags are most popular on a website by seeing the relative font size of the tags, popular tags being bigger. They seem to have fallen out of fashion, …
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clipPath vs. mask
27.12.2020
These things are so similar, I find it hard to keep them straight. This is a nice little explanation from viewBox (what a cool name and URL, I hope they keep it up).
The big thing is that clipPath (the element in SVG, as well as clip-path in CSS) is vector and when it is applied, whatever you...
A Utility Class for Covering Elements
26.12.2020
Big ol’ same to Michelle Barker here:
Here’s something I find myself needing to do again and again in CSS: completely covering one element with another. It’s the same CSS every time: the first element (the one that needs to be covered) has position: relative applied to it....
Responsible, Conditional Loading
25.12.2020
Over on the Polyplane blog (there’s no byline but presumably it’s Kilian Valkhof), there is a great article, Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data, about the prefers-reduced-data media query. No browser support yet, but eventually you can use it in CSS to make choices that reduce...
Integrating TypeScript with Svelte
24.12.2020
Svelte is one of the newer JavaScript frameworks and it’s rapidly rising in popularity. It’s a template-based framework, but one which allows for arbitrary JavaScript inside the template bindings; it has a superb reactivity story that’s simple, flexible and effective; and as an ahead-of-time (AOT)...
A Calendar in Three Lines of CSS
24.12.2020
This article has no byline and is on a website that is even more weirdly specific than this one is, but I appreciate the trick here. A seven-column grid makes for a calendar layout pretty quick. You can let the days (grid items) fall onto it naturally, except kick the first day over to the correct...
Custom Styles in GitHub Readme Files
23.12.2020
Even though GitHub Readme files (typically ./readme.md) are Markdown, and although Markdown supports HTML, you can’t put <style> or <script> tags init. (Well, you can, they just get stripped.) So you can’t apply custom styles there. Or can you?
You can use SVG as...
Continuous Performance Analysis with Lighthouse CI and GitHub Actions
23.12.2020
Lighthouse is a free and open-source tool for assessing your website’s performance, accessibility, progressive web app metrics, SEO, and more. The easiest way to use it is through the Chrome DevTools panel. Once you open the DevTools, you will see a “Lighthouse” tab. Clicking the “Generate report”...
“Yes or No?”
23.12.2020
Sara Soueidan digs into this HTML/UX situation. “Yes” or “no” is a boolean situation. A checkbox represents this: it’s either on or off (uh, mostly). But is a checkbox always the best UX? It depends, of course:
Use radio buttons if you expect the answer to be equally...
Edge Everything
22.12.2020
The series is a wrap my friends! Thanks for reading and a big special thanks to all the authors this year who shared something they have learned. Many authors really swung wide with thoughts about how we can be better and do better, which of course I really love.
Adam showed us logical properties...
Recognizing Constraints
22.12.2020
There’s a “C” word in web development that we don’t give enough attention to. No, I’m not talking about “continuous integration”, or even “CSS”. The “C” word I’m talking about is “constraints”. Understanding constraints is a vital part of building software that works the best it can in its targeted...
WooCommerce on Mobile
22.12.2020
Whether you use the eCommerce features on WordPress.com or use WooCommerce on your self-hosted WordPress site (like we do), you can use the WooCommerce mobile app. That’s right WooCommerce has native apps for iOS and Android. They’ve just released some nice upgrades to both, making them...
Deploying a Serverless Jamstack Site with RedwoodJS, Fauna, and Vercel
22.12.2020
This article is for anyone interested in the emerging ecosystem of tools and technologies related to Jamstack and serverless. We’re going to use Fauna’s GraphQL API as a serverless back-end for a Jamstack front-end built with the Redwood framework and deployed with a one-click deploy on Vercel.
In...
How The Web is Really Built
22.12.2020
My 2020 was colored by the considerable amount of time I spent analyzing data about CSS usage in the wild, for the CSS chapter of the Web Almanac, by the HTTP Archive. The results were eye-opening to me. A wake-up call of sorts. We spend so much time in the bubble of bleeding-edge tech that we lose...
2020 Roundup of Web Research
22.12.2020
It’s December! Lots of things are published this time of year, like developer advent calendars and organizations reflecting on the past year. We have even our own end-of-year series where we asked folks what they learned in 2020. But we also see lots of research come out around this time....
Retrospective on Fela
21.12.2020
I really appreciate a real-world walkthrough of a technology. Not only in what that technology does, but why it was chosen and how it worked for a team. Anybody can read the docs, but what you know after years of real-world usage is far more valuable. Hugo “Kitty” Giraudel:
I want to properly...