Search
Analyzing Notion app performance
8.6.2020
Here’s a fantastic case study where Ivan Akulov looks at the rather popular writing app Notion and how the team might improve the performance in a variety of ways; through code splitting, removing unused vendor code, module concatenation, and deferring JavaScript execution. Not so long ago, we made...
Diverse Illustration
7.6.2020
Hey gang, #BlackLivesMatter.
One tiny way I thought we could help here on this site, aside from our efforts as individuals, is to highlight some design resources that are both excellent and feature Black people. Representation matters.
Here’s one. You know Pablo Stanley? Pablo is a wonderful...
How I Used Brotli to Get Even Smaller CSS and JavaScript Files at CDN Scale
5.6.2020
This article is about my experience using Brotli at production scale. Despite being really expensive and a truly unfeasible method for on-the-fly compression, Brotli is actually very economical and saves cost on many fronts, especially when compared with gzip or lower compression levels...
A/B Testing Instant.Page With Netlify and Speedcurve
5.6.2020
Instant.Page does one special thing to make sites faster: it preloads the next page when it’s pretty sure you’re going to click a link (either by hovering over 65ms or mousedown on desktop, or touchstart on mobile), so when you do complete the click (probably a few hundred milliseconds...
Understand why CSS has no effect with the Inactive CSS rules indicator in Firefox DevTools
5.6.2020
It’s useful when DevTools tells you that a declaration is invalid. For example, colr: red; isn’t valid because colr isn’t a valid property. Likewise color: rd; isn’t valid because rd isn’t a valid value. For the most part, a browser’s DevTools shows...
A Primer on Display Advertising for Web Designers
4.6.2020
A lot of websites (this one included) rely on advertising as an important revenue source. Those ad placements directly impact the interfaces we build and interact with every day. Building layouts with ads in them is a dance of handling them in fluid environments, and also balancing the need...
The Best Design System Tool is Slack
4.6.2020
There’s a series questions I have struggled with for as long as I can remember. The questions have to do with how design systems work: Where should we document things? Do we make a separate app? Do we use a third-party tool to document our components? How should that tie into Figma or Sketch?...
Adding CSS to a Page via HTTP Headers
4.6.2020
Only Firefox supports it, but if you return a request with a header like this:
Header add Link "<style.css;rel=stylesheet;media=all"
…that will link to that stylesheet without you having to do it in the HTML. Louis Lazaris digs into it:
[…] the only thing I can think of that could...
Jumping Into Webmentions With NextJS (or Not)
3.6.2020
Webmention is a W3C recommendation last published on January 12, 2017. And what exactly is a Webmention? It’s described as…
[…] a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver’s perspective, it’s a way to request notifications when other sites...
On fixed elements and backgrounds
3.6.2020
After just playing with apsect-ratio and being pleasantly surprised at how intuitive it is, here’s an example of CSS acting unintuitively:
If you have a fixed element on your page, which means it doesn’t move when you scroll, you might realise that it no longer acts fixed if you apply a...
Behind the Source: Cassie Evans
3.6.2020
I feel like the tech industry takes itself far too seriously sometimes. I get frustrated by all the posturing and gatekeeping – “You’re not a real developer unless you use x framework”, “CSS isn’t a real programming language”.
I think this kind of rhetoric often puts new developers off,...
Chrome 83 Form Element Styles
3.6.2020
There have been some aesthetic changes to what form elements look like as of Chrome 83. Anything with gradient colorization is gone (notably the extra-shiny <meter stuff). The consistency across the board is nice, particularly between inputs and textareas. Not a big fan of the new <select...
A New Way to Delay Keyframes Animations
2.6.2020
If you’ve ever wanted to add a pause between each iteration of your CSS @keyframes animation, you’ve probably been frustrated to find there’s no built-in way to do it in CSS. Sure, we can delay the start of a set of @keyframes with animation-delay, but there’s no way to add time between...
Jetpack Scan
2.6.2020
Fresh from the Jetpack team at Automattic, today, comes Jetpack Scan. Jetpack Scan scans all the files on your site looking for anything suspicious or malicious and lets you know, or literally fixes it for you with your one-click approval.
This kind of security scanning is very important to...
Rotated Table Column Headers… Now With Fewer Magic Numbers!
1.6.2020
Rotated <table> column headers is something that’s been covered before right here on CSS-Tricks, so shout-out to that for getting me started and helping me achieve this effect. As the article points out, if you aren’t using trigonometry to calculate your table styles, you’ll have to rely...
Overlapping Header with CSS Grid
1.6.2020
Snook shows off a classic design with an oversized header up top, and a content area that is “pulled up” into that header area. My mind goes to the same place:
Historically, I’ve done this with negative margins. The header has a height that adds a bunch of padding to the bottom...
Increment Issue 13: Frontend
30.5.2020
Increment is a beautiful quarterly magazine (print and web) published by Stripe “about how teams build and operate software systems at scale”. While there is always stuff about making websites in general, this issue is the first focused on front-end¹ development.
I’ve got...
Global CSS options with custom properties
30.5.2020
With a preprocessor, like Sass, building a logical “do this or don’t” setting is fairly straightforward:
$option: false;
@mixin doThing {
@if $option {
do-thing: yep;
}
}
.el {
@include doThing;
}
Can we do that in native CSS with custom properties? Mark Otto shows...
Building Your First Serverless Service With AWS Lambda Functions
29.5.2020
Many developers are at least marginally familiar with AWS Lambda functions. They’re reasonably straightforward to set up, but the vast AWS landscape can make it hard to see the big picture. With so many different pieces it can be daunting, and frustratingly hard to see how they fit seamlessly into...
Jamstack News!
29.5.2020
I totally forgot that the Jamstack Conf was this week but thankfully they’ve already published the talks on the Jamstack YouTube channel. I’m really looking forward to sitting down with these over a coffee while I also check out Netlify’s other big release today: Build Plugins.
These are plugins...