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The :focus-visible Trick
16.10.2020
Always worth repeating: all interactive elements should have a focus style. That way, a keyboard user can tell when they have moved focus to that element.
But if you use :focus alone for this, it has a side effect that a lot of people don’t like. It means that when you click (with a mouse)...
People Problems
16.10.2020
Just the other day, Jeremy Keith wrote that problems with performance work isn’t only a matter of optimization and fixing code, but also tackling people problems:
It struck me that there’s a continuum of performance challenges. On one end of the continuum, you’ve got technical issues. These can...
Full Bleed
15.10.2020
We’ve covered techniques before for when you want a full-width element within a constrained-width column, like an edge-to-edge image within a narrower column of text. There are loads of techniques.
Perhaps my favorite is this little utility class:
.full-width {
width: 100vw;
position:...
Layoutit Grid: Learning CSS Grid Visually With a Generator
15.10.2020
Layoutit Grid is an interactive open source CSS Grid generator. It lets you draw your designs and see the code as you go. You can interact with the code, add or remove track lines and drag them around to change the sizing — and you get to see the CSS and HTML change in real time!
Add some tracks...
Bloq Enters DeFi World With Simplified Staking Product ‘Vesper’
14.10.2020
Vesper will pool and stake deposited ether (ETH), wrapped bitcoin (wBTC) or tether (USDT) across DeFi protocols selected on the basis of a user’s risk preference starting mid-November
How to Create a Realistic Motion Blur with CSS Transitions
14.10.2020
Before we delve into making a realistic motion blur in CSS, it’s worth doing a quick dive into what motion blur is, so we can have a better idea of what we’re trying to reproduce.
Have you ever taken a photo of something moving quickly, especially under low light, and it turned into a blurry...
Let’s Create Our Own Authentication API with Nodejs and GraphQL
13.10.2020
Authentication is one of the most challenging tasks for developers just starting with GraphQL. There are a lot of technical considerations, including what ORM would be easy to set up, how to generate secure tokens and hash passwords, and even what HTTP library to use and how to use it. 
In...
Netlify Edge Handlers
13.10.2020
Some very cool news from Netlify: Edge Handlers are in Early Access (request it here). I think these couple of lines of code do a great job in explaining what an Edge Handler is:
export function onRequest(event) {
console.log(`Incoming request for ${event.request.url}`);
...
Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust Attains SEC Reporting Company Status
13.10.2020
Grayscale Investments says the registration statement on Form 10 that it filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on behalf of the Ethereum Trust has become effective. This means Ethereum Trust is now an official SEC reporting company and the second digital currency investment...
Run Gulp as You Open a VS Code Project
13.10.2020
When I open my local project for this very site, there is a 100% chance that I need to run this command before anything else: gulp. I set that up fresh less than a year ago so I’m on the latest-and-greatest stuff and have my workflow just how I like it. I did a few more tweaks a few months...
How to Recreate the Ripple Effect of Material Design Buttons
12.10.2020
When I first discovered Material Design, I was particularly inspired by its button component. It uses a ripple effect to give users feedback in a simple, elegant way.
How does this effect work? Material Design’s buttons don’t just sport a neat ripple animation, but the animation also...
Animating Number Counters
9.10.2020
Number animation, as in, imagine a number changing from 1 to 2, then 2 to 3, then 3 to 4, etc. over a specified time. Like a counter, except controlled by the same kind of animation that we use for other design animation on the web. This could be useful when designing something like a dashboard,...
Balancing on a pivot with Flexbox
8.10.2020
Let me show you a way I recently discovered to center a bunch of elements around what I call the pivot. I promise you that funky HTML is out of the question and you won’t need to know any bleeding-edge CSS to get the job done.
I’m big on word games, so I recently re-imagined the main menu...
The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers
7.10.2020
This is an extended version of my essay “When front-end means full-stack” which was published in the wonderful Increment magazine put out by Stripe. It’s also something of an evolution of a couple other of my essays, “The Great Divide” and “Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.”
The post...
Looking at AWS Amplify
7.10.2020
AWS Amplify is a collection of tools from AWS to help you build applications.
Allow me to set the stage here to try to make that as clear as I know how. I have a friend (true story) who wants to build an app centered around physical training. His wife is a physical trainer, and they think perhaps...
Using JavaScript to Adjust Saturation and Brightness of RGB Colors
6.10.2020
Lately I’ve been taking a look into designing with color (or “colour” as we spell it where I’m from in New Zealand). Looking at Adam Wathan and Steve Schroger’s advice on the subject, we find that we’re going to need more than just five nice looking hex codes from a color palette...
On the Web Share API
6.10.2020
I think the Web Share API is very cool (here’s our coverage). In a nutshell, it taps into the native sharing features on whatever platform you’re on, if that platform supports it. So essentially…
I like this:
Web Share API activated on iOS
A heck of a lot more than these...
Styling Complex Labels
5.10.2020
Danielle Romo covers the HTML pattern you need when you have a wordy <label> with fancy styling for an <input type="radio">.
The trick? The ol’ <span class="hidden-visually"> that contains the label that you want to be read, and a <span aria-hidden="true"> with...
How to Make an Unobtrusive Scroll-to-Top Button
5.10.2020
A button to return to the top of the page allows the user to quickly return to the top of the page without making too much effort. This can be very useful when the page has a lot of content or which happens, for example, on one page websites, when infinite scrolling is used, or on mobile devices...
Parsel: A tiny, permissive CSS selector parser
2.10.2020
If you’ve ever thought to yourself, gosh, self, I wish I could have an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of this CSS selector, Lea has your back.
If you’ve ever thought that same thing for an entire CSS file, that’s what PostCSS is, which has gone v8. PostCSS doesn’t do anything...