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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...
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?...