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Consistent Backends and UX: How Do New Algorithms Help?
26.3.2020
Article Series
Why should you care?
What can go wrong?
What are the barriers to adoption?
How do new algorithms help?
In previous articles, we explained what consistency is, the difference between "strong" and "eventual" consistency, and why this distinction is more important than ever to modern...
Get Static
26.3.2020
In this piece, Eric Meyer argues that performance is more important than ever right now — especially for websites that contain critical information for the public:
If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to...
How to Repeat Text as a Background Image in CSS Using element()
26.3.2020
There’s a design trend I’ve seen popping up all over the place. Maybe you’ve seen it too. It’s this sort of thing where text is repeated over and over. A good example is the price comparison website, GoCompare, who used it in a major multi-channel advertising campaign.
Nike has used it as well...
Add Beautiful Images with the Unsplash API
26.3.2020
Perhaps you know Unsplash? I'd wager it's the most popular stock photography site out there for two big reasons:
Every photo on there is pretty darn nice
Every photo is entirely free even for commercial use. You don't have to ask permission or even credit it (although that's appreciated).
Here's...
Value Bubbles for Range Inputs
26.3.2020
HTML5 range inputs, in supported browsers and by design, don't show the user the actual value they are submitting. If you want to use the cool slider, but show the value, you'll have to do that yourself. Here we use the output element and jQuery to show the current value in a bubble that hovers...
How to Animate Text with SVG and CSS
26.3.2020
The other day I was helping my pal Jez work Dept. of Enthusiasm, the site for his newsletter, and I had a thought. What if we made the word “enthusiasm” in the title animate a little bit? Like, what if each of the letters in the word bopped up and down enthusiastically?
Like this:
CodePen Embed...
CSS Viewport Units
26.3.2020
Deep dive from Ahmad. I like the coverage of vmin and vmax, which I think I don't reach for as often as I should.
I'm thinking that if you are doing something highly directional (e.g. a full bleed trick), then directly using vw is necessary. On the other hand, if you're doing a calculation where...
An Introduction to MDXJS
25.3.2020
Markdown has traditionally been a favorite format for programmers to write documentation. It’s simple enough for almost everyone to learn and adapt to while making it easy to format and style content. It was so popular that commands from Markdown have been used in chat applications like Slack...
Auto-Growing Inputs & Textareas
25.3.2020
By default, <input> and <textarea> elements don't change size based on the content they contain. In fact, there isn't any simple HTML or CSS way to make them do that. Kinda funny, as that seems like a reasonable use-case. But of course, there are ways, my friend. There are always...
Did You Know the Ordered List Element Has Start and Reversed Attributes?
24.3.2020
I sure didn't! Tomek Sułkowsi shows how we can reverse the numbering of ordered lists with a simple HTML attribute:
<ol reversed<liApple</li<liBanana</li<liPear</li</ol
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And the start attribute can be added to begin the list at a number other...
Emojis as Favicons
24.3.2020
Lea Verou had a dang genius idea to use an emoji as a favicon. The idea only recently possible as browsers have started supporting SVG for favicons. Chuck an emoji inside an SVG <text element and use that as the favicon.
Now that all modern browsers support SVG favicons, here's how...
Indicating Scroll Position on a Page With CSS
24.3.2020
Scrolling is something we all know and do on the web to the extent that it’s an expectation or perhaps even a habit, like brushing our teeth. That’s probably why we don’t put too much thought into designing the scrolling experience — it’s a well-known basic function. In fact, the popular “there...
Performance Links
24.3.2020
I've had a number of browser tabs open to articles all related to web performance and gosh darn it if blogging them is a way for me get some closure. They are all good!
Manuel Matuzovic, Why 543 KB keep me up at night:
Yes, I know, it depends. 543 KB aren't always bad, but on that specific page...
Different Favicon for Development
24.3.2020
I bet a lot of us tend to have the production website and the development website up simultaneously a lot. It's almost a developer cliché at this point to make some local change, refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh, and just not see the change, only to discover you were looking at the production...
CSS :nth-of-class selector
23.3.2020
That's not a thing.
But it kinda is!
Bram covers how frustrating .bar:nth-child(2) is. It's not "select the second element of class .bar." It's "select the second element if it also has the class .bar." The good news? There is a real selector that does the former:
:nth-child(2 of .bar) { }
Safari...
Building a Real-Time Chat App with React and Firebase
23.3.2020
In this article, we’ll cover key concepts for authenticating a user with Firebase in a real-time chat application. We’ll integrate third-party auth providers (e.g. Google, Twitter and GitHub) and, once users are signed in, we’ll learn how to store user chat data in the Firebase Realtime Database...
CSS Can Influence Screenreaders
23.3.2020
Ben Myers covers some clear examples of where CSS totally changes what some screen readers announce. For example, some screenreader will see text-transform: uppercase; on a button label that says "Add" and read it like an abbreviation, "A.D.D."
These cases of CSS messing with our screenreader...
Flexible Repeating SVG Masks
22.3.2020
Tyler Gaw reminds us that mask-image can repeat, resize, and move just like background-image does, which is fun to combine and play with. I could see it being a fun option for an <hr, like Sara is doing.
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Direct Link to Article — Permalink… Read article...
Auto-Archival
20.3.2020
I'm sure most of us have used the ol' Wayback Machine to access some site that's gone offline. I don't actually know how it decides what sites to archive and when, but you can tell it to save pages. There is UI for it right on its homepage.
Also, there is a little trick...
Typing...
Client-Side Image Editing on Mobile
20.3.2020
Michael Scharnagl:
Ever wanted to easily convert an image to a grayscale image on your phone? I do sometimes, and that's why I build a demo using the Web Share Target API to achieve exactly that.
For this I used the Service Worker way to handle the data. Once the data is received on the client,...