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A Lightweight Masonry Solution
31.7.2020
Back in May, I learned about Firefox adding masonry to CSS grid. Masonry layouts are something I’ve been wanting to do on my own from scratch for a very long time, but have never known where to start. So, naturally, I checked the demo and then I had a lightbulb moment when I understood...
Spotting a Trend
31.7.2020
There are tons of smokin’ hot websites out there, with an equal or greater number of talented designers and developers who make them. The web is awesome like that and encourages that sort of creativity.
Even so, it amazes me that certain traits find their way into things. I mean, it makes...
SVG Title vs. HTML Title Attribute
30.7.2020
You know the title attribute? I can do this:
<div title="The Title"I'm a div with a `title`
</div
And now if I’m on a device with a mouse pointer and hover the cursor over that element, I get…
Which, uh, I guess is something. I sometimes use it for things like putting...
Getting the Most Out of Variable Fonts on Google Fonts
30.7.2020
I have spent the past several years working (alongside a bunch of super talented people) on a font family called Recursive Sans & Mono, and it just launched officially on Google Fonts!
Wanna try it out super fast? Here’s the embed code to use the full Recursive variable font family from Google...
Dark Ages of the Web
30.7.2020
A very fun jaunt through the early days of front-end web development. They are open to pull requests, so submit one if you’re into this kind of fun chronicling of our weird history!
That CSS3 Button generator really hits home. 😬
Direct Link to Article — Permalink… Read...
style9: build-time CSS-in-JS
29.7.2020
In April of last year, Facebook revealed its big new redesign. An ambitious project, it was a rebuild of a large site with a massive amount of users. To accomplish this, they used several technologies they have created and open-sourced, such as React, GraphQL, Relay, and a new CSS-in-JS library...
A Bit on Web Component Libraries
29.7.2020
A run of Web Components news crossed my desk recently so I thought I’d group it up here.
To my mind, one of the best use cases for Web Components is pattern libraries. Instead of doing, say, <ul class="nav nav-tabs"> like you would do in Bootstrap or <div class="tabs"> like...
Want to get better at code? Teach someone CSS.
28.7.2020
A friend of mine recently asked me to teach her to code. She was an absolute beginner, having no idea what coding really involves. I decided to start where I started: HTML and CSS. Using CodePen, we started forking Pens and altering them. Soon, a learning path started to unravel.
The aim of this...
The GitHub Profile Trick
28.7.2020
Monica Powell shared a really cool trick the other day:
The profile README is created by creating a new repository that’s the same name as your username. For example, my GitHub username is m0nica so I created a new repository with the name m0nica.
Now the README.md from that repo is essentially...
CSS Vocabulary
27.7.2020
This is a neat interactive page by Ville V. Vanninen to reference the names of things in the CSS syntax. I feel like the easy ones to remember are “selector,” “property,” and “value,” but even as a person who writes about CSS a lot, I forget some of the others....
Using Trello as a Super Simple CMS
27.7.2020
Sometimes our sites need a little sprinkling of content management. Not always. Not a lot. But a bit. The CMS market is thriving with affordable, approachable products, so we’re not short of options. Thankfully, it is a very different world to the one that used to force companies to splash out...
Bold on Hover… Without the Layout Shift
27.7.2020
When you change the font-weight of a font, the text will typically cause a bit of a layout shift. That’s because bold text is often larger and takes up more space. Sometimes that doesn’t matter, like a vertical stack of links where the wider/bolder text doesn’t push anything...
Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns
25.7.2020
Why? Fingerprinting. Rather than these APIs being used for what they are meant for, they end up being used for gross ad tech. As in, “hey, we don’t know exactly who you are, but wait, through a script we can tell your phone stopped being idle from 8:00 am to 8:13 am and were near...
A Font-Like SVG Icon System for Vue
24.7.2020
Managing a custom collection of icons in a Vue app can be challenging at times. An icon font is easy to use, but for customization, you have to rely on third-party font generators, and merge conflicts can be painful to resolve since fonts are binary files.
Using SVG files instead can eliminate...
Holy Albatross with Widths
24.7.2020
Heydon’s Holy Albatross is a technique to have a row of elements break into a column of elements at a specific width. A specified parent width, not a screen width like a media query would have. So, like a container query (ya know, those things that don’t exist yet that we...
WordPress.com Growth Summit
23.7.2020
I’m speaking at The Official WordPress.com Growth Summit coming up in August. “Learn how to build and grow your site, from start to scale”, as they say. Lovely, thick, diverse set of speakers. It’s a little bit outside my normal spheres which makes...
Accordion Rows in CSS Grid
23.7.2020
I’d bet grid-template-columns is used about 10× more than grid-template-rows, but maybe everyone has just been missing out. Eric Meyer chucks a bunch of row lines onto his main site layout grid like this:
grid-template-rows: repeat(7, min-content) 1fr repeat(3, min-content);
That way, if...
Vue 3.0 has entered Release Candidate stage!
23.7.2020
Vue is in the process of a complete overhaul that rebuilds the popular JavaScript framework from the ground up. This has been going on the last couple of years and, at long last, the API and implementation of Vue 3 core are now stabilize. This is exciting for a number of reasons:
Vue 3 promises...
CMD+Z for Git is Here
23.7.2020
Version control with Git has become a “commodity” by now: virtually every software project today uses Git, and virtually every developer knows Git to some extent. This explains why I sometimes hear the following question when I talk about what I do for a living: “A desktop client...
Position Vertical Scrollbars on Opposite Side with CSS
23.7.2020
Fair warning: I can’t say I recommend this in general because it breaks a very strong expectation of where scrollbars are, which are useful for a lots of folks, not to mention, a core accessibility feature for many.
But it is a fascinating CSS trick and the web is a big place with...