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Chapter 3: The Website
19.8.2020
Previously in web history…
Berners-Lee, motivated by his own curiosity, creates the World Wide Web at CERN. He releases its technologies to the public domain, which enables the development of several new browsers for every operating system. Mosaic proves to the most popular, and...
A Community-Driven Site with Eleventy: Preparing for Contributions
19.8.2020
I’ve recently found myself reaching for Eleventy (aka 11ty) above all other tools when I want to develop a website. It’s hard to beat a static site generator that provides advanced templating opportunities while otherwise getting out of your way and allowing you to just create.
One...
Can you get valid CSS property values from the browser?
19.8.2020
I had someone write in with this very legit question. Lea just blogged about how you can get valid CSS properties themselves from the browser. That’s like this.
CodePen Embed Fallback
That gives you, for example, the fact that cursor is a thing. But then how do you know what valid values...
Timer Bars in CSS with Custom Properties
18.8.2020
I was working on a thing the other day that needed a visible timer. There was UI precedent for this type of timer on the project. People didn’t want to see numbers ticking downward; it was more ideal to see a “bar” drain away from full to empty. I mention that because there...
Queue Jumping in Netlify
18.8.2020
Cutting to the chase: if you’re on a Business or Enterprise team on Netlify, you can click a build to make it run next in a queue. For example, if you have a really time-sensitive thing (e.g. a bug fix going to production), it can jump ahead of some random development branch building....
radEventListener: a Tale of Client-side Framework Performance
18.8.2020
React is popular, popular enough that it receives its fair share of criticism. Yet, this criticism of React isn’t completely unwarranted: React and ReactDOM total about 120 KiB of minified JavaScript, which definitely contributes to slow startup time. When client-side rendering in React is relied...
The New CSS-Tricks Video Intro by dina Amin
18.8.2020
You know we do video screencasts, right? It’s not, like, super regular, but I have done them for a long time, still like doing them, and plan to keep doing them. I publish them here, but you can subscribe over on YouTube as well.
I’ve had a couple of different custom video intro...
What Happens When Border Radii Overlap?
17.8.2020
I’d wager that most times we’re rounding box corners in CSS, we’re applying a uniform border-radius value across the border. It’s a nice touch of polish in many designs. But there are times when we might want different radii for different corners. Easy, right? That way the property takes four...
CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVIII
15.8.2020
Hey gang! I’ve been fortunate enough to be a guest in a variety of different here, so I thought it was time for another Chronicle post. You know, those special posts where I round up the random goings-on of things I do off of this site.
I joined Ed & Tom over on A Question of Code.
We...
That’s Just How I Scroll
14.8.2020
How do you know a page (or any element on that page) scrolls? Well, if it has a scrollbar, that’s a pretty good indication. You might still have to scrapple with your client about “the fold” or whatever, but I don’t think anyone is confused at what a scrollbar is or what...
What I Learned by Fixing One Line of CSS in an Open Source Project
14.8.2020
I was browsing the Svelte docs on my iPhone and came across a blaring UI bug. The notch in the in the REPL knob was totally out of whack. I’m always looking to contribute to open source, and I thought this would be a quick and easy fix. Turns out, there was a lot more to it than just changing...
Stacked Cards with Sticky Positioning and a Dash of Sass
13.8.2020
The other day, I spotted this particularly lovely bit from Corey Ginnivan’s website where a collection of cards stack on top of one another as you scroll.
I started wondering how much JavaScript this would involve and how you’d go about making it when I realized — ah! — this must be the work...
Chapter 2: Browsers
12.8.2020
Previously in web history…
Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates the technologies behind the web — HTML, HTTP, and the URL which blend hypertext with the Internet — with a small team at CERN. He convinces the higher-ups in the organizations to put the web in the public domain so anyone can...
Practical Use Cases for JavaScript’s closest() Method
12.8.2020
Have you ever had the problem of finding the parent of a DOM node in JavaScript, but aren’t sure how many levels you have to traverse up to get to it? Let’s look at this HTML for instance:
<div data-id="123"<buttonClick me</button</div
That’s pretty straightforward, right? Say...
Halfmoon: A Bootstrap Alternative with Dark Mode Built In
11.8.2020
I recently launched the first production version of Halfmoon, a front-end framework that I have been building for the last few months. This is a short introductory post about what the framework is, and why I decided to build it.
The elevator pitch
Halfmoon is a front-end framework with a...
Register for An Event Apart’s Front-End Focus Online Conference
11.8.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
An Event Apart has been doing these single-day online “Online together” conferences. You can check out the last couple, which are available on-demand (buy it, watch it when you want) for a limited time:
Online Together (available through December...
System UIcons
11.8.2020
This is a great collection of icons by Corey Ginnivan that’s both free and with no attribution required when you use them. The style is super simple. Each icon looks like older versions of the icons from macOS to me because they’re cute but not too cute.
Also? The icon picker UI is slick and looks...
Don’t Wait! Mock the API
10.8.2020
Today we have a loose coupling between the front end and the back end of web applications. They are usually developed by separate teams, and keeping those teams and the technology in sync is not easy. To solve part of this problem, we can “fake” the API server that the back end tech...
zerodivs.com
10.8.2020
Pretty neat little website from Joan Perals, inspired by stuff like Lynn’s A Single Div. With multiple hard-stop background-image gradients, you don’t need extra HTML elements to draw shapes — you can draw as many shapes as you want on a single element. There is even a stacking order...
Nailing the Perfect Contrast Between Light Text and a Background Image
7.8.2020
Have you ever come across a site where light text is sitting on a light background image? If you have, you’ll know how difficult that is to read. A popular way to avoid that is to use a transparent overlay. But this leads to an important question: Just how transparent should that overlay...