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Form design
15.9.2020
A very digestable guide from Geri Reid on building forms. Not the code, but the design and UX principles that should guide the code.
Working on a design system for a bank has taught [me] a lot about forms. I’ve watched testing in our labs. I’ve worked alongside experts from specialist...
content-visibility: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance
14.9.2020
Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin:
[…] you can use another CSS property called content-visibility to apply the needed containment automatically. content-visibility ensures that you get the largest performance gains the browser can provide with minimal effort from you as...
Read Me!
12.9.2020
A fancy experiential essay from the team at Readymag, which is a tool for building… fancy experiential essays, about fancy experiential essays:
With all the technology addressing readability issues, it’s still design basics that distinguish a readable text from one that isn’t. Here are some...
Using a brightness() filter to generically highlight content
12.9.2020
Rick Strahl:
I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve implemented a custom ‘button’ like CSS implementation. Over the years I’ve used images, backgrounds, gradients, and opacity to effectively ‘highlight’ a control. All that works of course,...
Defining “View Source”
10.9.2020
Last time there was a little flurry of activity around the concept of “View Source,” I did get the sense that not everyone was on the same page about what that even means. Jim Nielsen:
First, when we talk about “View Source” what precisely are we talking about? I think this is...
a11y is web accessibility
29.8.2020
Eric Bailey eviscerates the notion that the term “a11y” isn’t accessible. It’s a hot take that I’ve had myself, embarrassingly enough.
I never see people asking why WWI is written out the way it is, either. Won’t people confuse that with the first Wonder Woman movie?...
a11y is web accessibility
29.8.2020
Eric Bailey eviscerates the notion that the term “a11y” isn’t accessible. It’s a hot take that I’ve had myself, embarrassingly enough.
I never see people asking why WWI is written out the way it is, either. Won’t people confuse that with the first Wonder Woman movie?...
Deeper DX
27.8.2020
Shawn Wang thinks there are deeper, perhaps more uncomfortable, places to go with developer experience (DX) beyond the surface-level stuff that we recently covered. Sure, sure, documentation, CLIs, good demos. But there are much harder questions to answer that are part of the real DX. Shawn lists...
A Bit on CI/CD
27.8.2020
I’d say “website” fits better than “mobile app” but I like this framing from Max Lynch:
Every production mobile app ultimately has a set of recurring tasks around integration, testing, deployment, and long term maintenance. These tasks often must be automated across...
Comparing Data in Google and Netlify Analytics
25.8.2020
Jim Nielsen:
the datasets weren’t even close for me.
Google Analytics works by putting a client-side bit of JavaScript on your site. Netlify Analytics works by parsing server logs server-side. They are not exactly apples to apples, feature-wise. Google Analytics is, I think it’s fair...
To grid or not to grid
20.8.2020
Sarah Higley does accessibility work and finds that “tables and grids are over-represented in accessibility bugs.”
The drum has been banged a million times: don’t use a <table> for layout. But what goes around comes around. What’s the the #1 item in a list...
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...
font-weight: 300 considered harmful
7.8.2020
Tomáš Janoušek:
Many web pages these days set font-weight: 300 in their stylesheet. With DejaVu Sans as my preferred font, this results in very thin and light text that is hard to read, because for some reason the “DejaVu Sans ExtraLight” variant (weight 200) is being used...
JavaScript Fatigue
6.8.2020
From Nicholas Zakas’ newsletter, on how he avoids JavaScript fatigue:
 I don’t try to learn about every new thing that comes out. There’s a limited number of hours in the day and a limited amount of energy you can devote to any topic, so I choose not to learn about anything...
The Cicada Principle, revisited with CSS variables
5.8.2020
Lea Verou digging up the CSS trickery classic and applying it to clip the backgrounds of some code blocks:
The main idea is simple: You write your main rule using CSS variables, and then use :nth-of-*() rules to set these variables to something different every N items. If you use enough...
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...
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...
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...
When do you use inline-block?
20.7.2020
The inline-block value for display is a classic! It’s not new and browser support is certainly not something you need to worry about. I’m sure many of us reach for it intuitively. But let’s put a point on it. What is it actually useful for? When do you pick it over other, perhaps...