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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...
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...
Levels of Fix
20.7.2020
On the web, we have the opportunity to do work that fixes things for people. It’s fascinating to me how different the scope of those fixes can be.
Consider the media query prefers-reduced-motion. Eric wrote:
I think it’s also worth pointing out the true...
Develop, Preview, Test
17.7.2020
Guillermo:
I want to make the case that prioritizing end-to-end (E2E) testing for the critical parts of your app will reduce risk and give you the best return. Further, I’ll show how you can adopt this methodology in mere minutes.
His test is:
Spin up Puppeteer (Headless Chrome)...
On dependency
17.7.2020
Rob Weychert:
But I can’t host your site or even my own site. I didn’t build the CMS. Other people made the hardware and software I use to generate and optimize images. Other people made the fonts. Other people standardized the digital formats for those images and fonts. I didn’t write the HTML...
Tradeoffs and Shifting Complexity
16.7.2020
This is a masterclass from Dave:
After you hit the wall of unremovable complexity, any “advances” are a shell game, making tradeoffs that get passed down to the user … you get “advances” by shifting where the complexity lives.
You don’t get free reductions in complexity. In CSS land...