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Advice for Complex CSS Illustrations
17.6.2020
If you were to ask me what question I hear most about front-end development, I’d say it’s“How do I get better at CSS?” And that question usually comes up to some CSS illustration I made, which is something I love to do over on CodePen.
To many, CSS is this mythical beast that can’t...
LingoJam
17.6.2020
I’ll sometimes search the web for something like “Small Text Generator” knowing there will be some website that will turn some dumb thing I want to type like:
Uhm hi when is that meeting again?
into something fun like…
ᵁʰᵐ ʰᶦ ʷʰᵉⁿ ᶦˢ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ᵐᵉᵉᵗᶦⁿᵍ ᵃᵍᵃᶦⁿˀ
Important note about...
Web Engine Diversity and Ecosystem Health
16.6.2020
As front-end developers, our job is working with browsers. Knowing how many we have and the health of them is always of great interest. As far as numbers go, we have fewer recently than we have in the past. It’s only this month that Edge is starting to auto-update browsers to the Chromium...
Everything You Need to Know About FLIP Animations in React
16.6.2020
With a very recent Safari update, Web Animations API (WAAPI) is now supported without a flag in all modern browsers (except IE).  Here’s a handy Pen where you can check which features your browser supports. The WAAPI is a nice way to do animation (that needs to be done in JavaScript) because...
What is Developer Experience (DX)?
16.6.2020
Developer Experience¹ is a term² that has one somewhat obvious meaning — the experience of developers — but it eludes definition in the sense that people invoke it at different times for different reasons referring to different things. For instance, our own Sarah Drasner’s current job title...
My Flywheel Landing Page
15.6.2020
Flywheel is my WordPress hosting partner here. I use Local every day for my WordPress local development environment and use their hosting for all my WordPress sites as part of my whole flow, so I’m glad they aren’t just a sponsor but a product I use and like.
Last November some of their...
Adding a Custom Welcome Guide to the WordPress Block Editor
15.6.2020
I am creating a WordPress plugin and there is a slight learning curve when it comes to using it. I’d like to give users a primer on how to use the plugin, but I want to avoid diverting users to documentation on the plugin’s website since that takes them out of the experience.
What would...
Striking a Balance Between Native and Custom Select Elements
12.6.2020
Here’s the plan! We’re going to build a styled select element. Not just the outside, but the inside too. Total styling control. Plus we’re going to make it accessible. We’re not going to try to replicate everything that the browser does by default with a native <select> element. We’re going...
Learn Z-Index Using a Visualization Tool
12.6.2020
There are some neat interactive demos in here from Thiru Manikandan. There are a couple of very tricky things with z-index that never fail to confuse. In addition to things like requiring positioning and source order, the trickiest are the stacking contexts and parent/child relationships. z-index...
CUBE CSS
11.6.2020
A CSS methodology from Andy Bell:
The most important part of this methodology is the language itself: CSS. It’s key to note its existence in the name because some alternative approaches, such as BEM—which I have enjoyed for many years—can veer very far away from Cascading Style Sheets. I love CSS...
On Adding IDs to Headers
11.6.2020
Here’s a two-second review. If an element has an ID, you can link to it with natural browser behavior. It’s great if headings have them, because it’s often useful to link directly to a specific section of content.
<h3 id="step-2"Step 2</a
Should I be so inclined, I could...
How to Reverse CSS Custom Counters
11.6.2020
I needed a numbered list of blog posts to be listed with the last/high first and going down from there. Like this:
5. Post Title
4. Post Title
3. Post Title
2. Post Title
1. Post Title
But the above is just text. I wanted to do this with a semantic <ol> element.
The easy way
This can...
Creative Background Patterns Using Gradients, CSS Shapes, and Even Emojis
10.6.2020
You can create stripes in CSS. That’s all I thought about in terms of CSS background patterns for a long time. There’s nothing wrong with stripes; stripes are cool. They can be customized into wide and narrow bands, criss-crossed into a checked pattern, and played with in other ways using the idea...
CSS :is() and :where() are coming to browsers
10.6.2020
Šime Vidas with the lowdown on what these pseudo-selectors are and why they will be useful:
:is() is to reduce repetition¹ of parts of comma-separated selectors.
:where() is the same, but nothing inside it affects specificity. The example of wrapping :where(:not()) is really great, as now there...
Cool Little CSS Grid Tricks for Your Blog
10.6.2020
I discovered CSS about a decade ago while trying to modify the look of a blog I had created. Pretty soon, I was able to code cool things with more mathematical and, therefore, easier-to-understand features like transforms. However, other areas of CSS, such as layout, have remained a constant source...
Making My Netlify Build Run Sass
9.6.2020
Let’s say you wanted to build a site with Eleventy as the generator. Popular choice these days! Eleventy doesn’t have some particularly blessed way of preprocessing your CSS, if that’s something you want to do. There are a variety of ways to do it and perhaps that freedom is part...
5 Myths About Jamstack
9.6.2020
Jamstack isn’t necessarily new. The term was officially coined in 2016, but the technologies and architecture it describes have been around well before that. Jamstack has received a massive dose of attention recently, with articles about it appearing in major sites and publications and...
The Trickery it Takes to Create eBook-Like Text Columns
8.6.2020
There’s some interesting CSS trickery in Jason Pamental’s latest Web Fonts & Typography News. Jason wanted to bring swipeable columns to his digital book experience on mobile. Which brings up an interesting question right away… how do you set full-width columns that...
How to Get All Custom Properties on a Page in JavaScript
8.6.2020
We can use JavaScript to get the value of a CSS custom property. Robin wrote up a detailed explanation about this in Get a CSS Custom Property Value with JavaScript. To review, let’s say we’ve declared a single custom property on the HTML element:
html {
--color-accent: #00eb9b;
}
In JavaScript...
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...