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How to Create a Timeline Task List Component Using SVG
24.11.2020
I’m thoroughly convinced that SVG unlocks a whole entire world of building interfaces on the web. It might seem daunting to learn SVG at first, but you have a spec that was designed to create shapes and yet, still has elements, like text, links, and aria labels available to you. You can accomplish...
Graphery SVG
24.11.2020
I’ve compared SVG and Canvas before. If you’re trying to decide between them, read that. I’d say the #1 difference between them is vector (SVG) versus raster (Canvas). But the #2 difference is how you work with them. SVG is declarative, as in, literal elements that express what they are through...
DRY-ing up styled-components
23.11.2020
I like working with styled-components. They allow you write CSS in your JavaScript, keeping your CSS in very close proximity to your JavaScript for a single component. As a front-end developer who loves to dissect a web page and break it down into reusable components, the idea of styled-components...
What’s Missing from CSS?
21.11.2020
The survey results from the State of CSS aren’t out yet, but they made this landing page that randomly shows you what one person wrote to answer that question. Just clicking the reload button a bunch, I get the sense that the top answers are:
Container Queries
Parent...
How You Might Build a Modern Day Webring
20.11.2020
I’m sure different people picture different things when they think about webrings, so let me clarify what I picture. I see an element on a website that:
Signifies this site is part of a webring
Allows you to move to the next or previous site of the webring
Maybe has other functionality like...
A Dynamically-Sized Sticky Sidebar with HTML and CSS
20.11.2020
Creating page content that sticks to the viewport as you scroll, something like a jump-to-anchor menu or section headings, has never been easier. Throw a position: sticky into your CSS ruleset, set the directional offset (e.g. top: 0) and you’re ready to impress your teammates with minimal effort....
console.log({ myVariable });
19.11.2020
I think this might be my most popular tweet of all time, but I’m not sure how to verify that these days. I’ll restate this neat little trick here because blogging is cool and fun.
I used to do this a lot while debugging JavaScript:
console.log("myVariable: ", myVariable);
But now I...
mediastack
19.11.2020
Have you ever had the idea for a website or new app that involved showing news content? You don’t have to create content yourself to have the right to build an innovative news reading experience. I remember when Flipboard came out. They didn’t (and still don’t) actually produce...
Color Theming with CSS Custom Properties and Tailwind
19.11.2020
Custom properties not only enable us to make our code more efficient, but allow us to work some real magic with CSS too. One area where they have huge potential is theming. At Atomic Smash we use Tailwind CSS, a utility class framework, for writing our styles. In this article, we’ll look at...
grid-auto-flow : CSS Grid :: flex-direction : Flexbox
19.11.2020
When setting a parent element to display: flex, its child elements align left-to-right like this:
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Now, one of the neat things we can do with flexbox is change the direction so that child elements are stacked vertically on top of each other in a column. We can do that with...
Firefox 83
19.11.2020
There’s a small line in the changelog that is is big news for CSS:
We’ve added support for CSS Conic Gradients (bug 1632351) and (bug 1175958).
🎉🎉🎉
Conic gradients are circular, just like their radial counterpart, but place color stops...
Thinking Outside the Box with CSS Grid
19.11.2020
Great tutorial from Alex Trost (based on some demos, like this one, from Andy Barefoot) showcasing how, while CSS grid has straight grid lines across and down, you can place items across grid lines creating a staggered effect that looks pretty rad. Grid-like, but it appears to align to diagonal...
Creating WebGL Effects with CurtainsJS
18.11.2020
This article focuses adding WebGL effects to <image> and <video> elements of an already “completed” web page. While there are a few helpful resources out there on this subject (like these two), I hope to help simplify this subject by distilling the process into a...
Upptime
18.11.2020
GitHub Actions are like free computers.
Well, there is pricing, but even free plans get 2,000 minutes a month. You write configuration files for what you want these computers to do. Those configuration files go into a repo, so typically they do things specific to that repo. I’m sure that...
Measuring Core Web Vitals with Sentry
17.11.2020
Chris made a few notes about Core Web Vitals the other day, explaining why measuring these performance metrics are so gosh darn important:
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...
Copyediting with Semantic HTML
17.11.2020
Tracking changes is a quintessential copyediting feature for comparing versions of content. While we’re used to tracking changes in a word processing document, we actually have HTML elements capable of that. There are a lot of elements that we can use for this process. The main ones we’ll look...
Jetpack Backup
17.11.2020
It’s no secret that CSS-Tricks is a WordPress site. And as such, we like to keep things WordPress-y, like enabling the block editor and creating some custom blocks. We also rely on Jetpack for a number of things, which if you haven’t tried, is definitely worth your time as it’s...
A Complete Guide to CSS Gradients
17.11.2020
Like how you can use the background-color property in CSS to declare a solid color background, you can use the background-image property not only to declare image files as backgrounds but gradients as well. Using CSS gradients is better for control and performance than using an actual image (of...
CSS Background Patterns
17.11.2020
Nice little tool from Jim Raptis: CSS Background Patterns. A bunch of easy-to-customize and copy-and-paste backgrounds that use hard stop CSS gradients to make classy patterns. Not quite as flexible as SVG backgrounds, but just as lightweight.
Like this:
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Speaking of cool...
Logical layout enhancements with flow-relative shorthands
16.11.2020
Admission: I’ve never worked on a website that was in anything other than English. I have worked on websites that were translated by other teams, but I didn’t have much to do with it. I do, however, spend a lot of time thinking in terms of block-level and inline-level elements....