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Chrome + System Fonts Snafu
24.4.2020
There was just a bug late last year where system fonts (at least on Mac, I don’t know what the story was on other platforms) in Chrome appeared too thin and tracked-in at small sizes and too thick and tracked-out at larger sizes. That one was fixed, thankfully. But while it was a problem,...
SVG, Favicons, and All the Fun Things We Can Do With Them
24.4.2020
Favicons are the little icons you see in your browser tab. They help you understand which site is which when you’re scanning through your browser’s bookmarks and open tabs. They’re a neat part of internet history that are capable of performing some cool tricks.
One very new trick is the ability...
Different Approaches to Responsive CSS Motion Path
24.4.2020
As a follow-up to Jhey’s recent post on responsive motion paths, Michelle Barker notes that another approach could be to just transform: scale() the whole dang element.
The trade-off there is that you’re scaling both the path and the element on the path at the same time; Jhey’s...
Dark mode and variable fonts
23.4.2020
Not so long ago, we wrote about dark mode in CSS and I’ve been thinking about how white text on a black background is pretty much always harder to read than black text on a white background. After thinking about this for a while, I realized that we can fix that problem by making the text thinner...
Accessible Font Sizing, Explained
23.4.2020
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), an organization that defines standards for web content accessibility, does not specify a minimum font size for the web.
But we know there’s such a thing as text that is too small to be legible, just as text that can be too large to consume. So,...
Innovating on Web Monetization: Coil and Firefox Reality
23.4.2020
I still think Coil is cool. I have it installed on CSS-Tricks as a publisher and money trickles in. I have a paid account and I trickle out money to other sites that use it. I wrote about all that last year.
This’ll explode to something huge if we actually get the Web Monetization API stuff....
Rethinking Twitter as a Serverless App
23.4.2020
In a previous article, we showed how to build a GraphQL API with FaunaDB. We’ve also written a series of articles [1, 2, 3, 4] explaining how traditional databases built for global scalability have to adopt eventual (vs. strong) consistency, and/or make compromises on relations and indexing...
Some Little Improvements to My VS Code Workflow (Workspaces, Icons, Tasks)
22.4.2020
I did a little thing the other day that I didn’t know was possible until then. I had a project folder open in VS Code like I always do, and I added another different root folder to the window. I always assumed when you had a project open, it was one top level root folder and that’s...
My Visual Studio Code Setup: Extensions and Themes
22.4.2020
Matthias Ott’s posted his VS Code setup. I find lists like this (I rounded up some recent updates of my own) irresistible, probably because, like y’all, I spend an awful lot of time in VS Code and wanna make sure I’m getting the most out of it.
Things from the list that stood...
How to Add Lunr Search to your Gatsby Website
22.4.2020
The Jamstack way of thinking and building websites is becoming more and more popular.
Have you already tried Gatsby, Nuxt, or Gridsome (to cite only a few)? Chances are that your first contact was a “Wow!” moment — so many things are automatically set up and ready to use. 
There are some...
Puzzles and Mysteries
22.4.2020
Bob Hoffman:
Puzzles, [Malcom Gladwell] wrote, are problems for which there is not enough information. An example of a puzzle: Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried? If we had more information, we would know the answer. If someone told us “Jimmy Hoffa is buried in New Jersey,” we’d know a little more than...
Fake Code
21.4.2020
Here’s a fun little idea from Knut Synstad. You give it the URL of a GitHub Gist and it converts the Gist into grayscale rounded blobs (SVG) that sorta look like code if you squint. Maybe fun for interesting dynamic backgrounds or for whatever you might use code-looking stock art for.
It...
Building a Scalable CSS Architecture With BEM and Utility Classes
21.4.2020
Maintaining a large-scale CSS project is hard. Over the years, we’ve witnessed different approaches aimed at easing the process of writing scalable CSS. In the end, we all try to meet the following two goals:
Efficiency: we want to reduce the time spent thinking about how things should...
Constrained CSS grids without `max-width`
21.4.2020
Ain’t nothing wrong with max-width, but Ethan makes a point in the last sentence:
Rather than simply defaulting to max-width as a constraint, I can use the empty space around my design, and treat it as a layout tool.
If the space “around” your grid...
Drupal to Jamstack
21.4.2020
I’ve been harping for a while that Jamstack doesn’t necessarily mean throwing away your old CMS. In fact, I’d argue that Jamstack is at it’s most powerful when paired with a system that you already know, are comfortable with, and perhaps even like. You’d call that...
Can JavaScript Detect the Browser’s Zoom Level?
21.4.2020
No, not really.
My first guess was that this was intentionally not exposed in browsers because browsers intentionally don’t want us fighting it — or making well-intentioned but bad-outcome decisions based on that info. But I don’t see any evidence of that.
StackOverflow answers paint...
The Contrast Triangle
21.4.2020
Chip Cullen:
Let’s say you’re building a site, and you’re working with a designer. They come to you with some solid designs, and you’re ready to go. You’re also a conscientious front end developer and you like to make sure the sites you build are accessible. The designs you’re working from have...
Creating Playful Effects With CSS Text Shadows
20.4.2020
Let’s have a look at how we can use the CSS text-shadow property to create truly 3D-looking text. You might think of text-shadow as being able to apply blurred, gradient-looking color behind text, and you would be right! But just like box-shadow, you can control how blurred the shadow is, including...
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
18.4.2020
Interesting research from Dan Luu:
… it’s pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it’s not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.
I think this is...
Front-End Challenges
17.4.2020
My favorite way to level up as a front-end developer is to do the work. Literally just build websites. If you can do it for money, great, you should. If the websites you make can help yourself or anyone else you care about, then that’s also great. In lieu of that, you can also make things...