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How to Create a “Skip to Content” Link
17.3.2020
Skip links are little internal navigation links that help users move around a page. It’s possible you’ve never actually seen one before because they’re often hidden from view and used as an accessibility enhancement that lets keyboard users and screen readers jump from the top of the page to...
15 Things to Improve Your Website Accessibility
17.3.2020
This is a really great list from Bruce. There is a lot of directly actionable stuff here. Send it around to your team and make it something that you all go through together.
Here's a little one that prodded me to finally fix...
Most screen readers allow the user to quickly see a list of links...
WooCommerce 4.0 & WooCommerce Payments Beta
17.3.2020
Y'all know WooCommerce: it's a plugin for WordPress that adds robust eCommerce functionality to your site. Notably, like WordPress itself, it's open-source and free. You only pay for things if you need things like special plugins that extend functionality.
This is a huge month for WooCommerce!...
CSS X
17.3.2020
My name appears in an article from Bert Bos (co-author of the original CSS spec), so I'll consider that a life accomplishment. Berts makes the point that CSS has evolved and the working group versions things, but the working group hasn't been and doesn't really plan to be involved in these...
Stop Using “Dropdown”
16.3.2020
Adrian Roselli notes that it might actually mean:
A <select> menu
An ARIA Listbox, Combobox, Menu, or Disclosure Widget
An input with a <datalist>
An input with autocomplete
A <details><summary> block
An accordion
Flyout navigation
In my own usage, I tend to mean...
How to Make Repeating Border Images
16.3.2020
I just saw this cool little site from Max Bittker: broider. You design an image on a 9-slice grid (except the middle part) and it will produce an image for you to use with border-image along with the CSS to copy and paste.
Check out my little design:
CodePen Embed Fallback
The areas of the image...
Build a Node.js Tool to Record and Compare Google Lighthouse Reports
16.3.2020
In this tutorial, I’ll show you step by step how to create a simple tool in Node.js to run Google Lighthouse audits via the command line, save the reports they generate in JSON format and then compare them so web performance can be monitored as the website grows and develops.
I’m hopeful this...
Using the HTML title attribute
15.3.2020
Steve Faulkner:
User groups not well served by use of the title attribute
• Mobile phone users.• Keyboard only users.• Screen magnifier users.• Screen reader users.• Users with fine motor skill impairments.• Users with cognitive impairments.
Sounds like in 2020, the only useful thing the title...
The CSS Podcast
15.3.2020
From Adam and Una at Google, a podcast just about CSS. I believe I'm contractually obliged to link to that! Just one episode out so far, a shorty about the box model.
Last time I wrote up podcasts I like was 8 years ago most of them are dead now, except the biggies like This American Life and...
“weeds of specificity”
13.3.2020
Lara Schenck:
[...] with WordPress child themes, you are all but guaranteed to get into the weeds of specificity, hunting around theme stylesheets that you didn’t author, trying to figure out what existing declaration is preventing you from applying a new style, and then figuring out the least...
Get Started Building GraphQL APIs With Node
13.3.2020
We all have a number of interests and passions. For example, I’m interested in JavaScript, 90’s indie rock and hip hop, obscure jazz, the city of Pittsburgh, pizza, coffee, and movies starring John Lurie. We also have family members, friends, acquaintances, classmates, and colleagues who also have...
A Guide to Handling Browser Events
13.3.2020
In this post, Sarah Chima walks us through how we can work with browser events, such as clicking, using JavaScript. There’s a ton of great info in here! If JavaScript isn’t your strong suit, I think this is the best explanation of event handling that I’ve read in quite some time.
When an event...
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
12.3.2020
Brent Jackson says CSS utility libraries failed somewhat:
Eventually, you'll need to add one-off styles that just aren't covered by the library you're using, and there isn't always a clear way to extend what you're working with. Without a clear way to handle things like this, developers tend...
Programming Sass to Create Accessible Color Combinations
12.3.2020
We are always looking to make the web more accessible. Color contrast is just math, so Sass can help cover edge cases that designers might have missed.
The post Programming Sass to Create Accessible Color Combinations appeared first on CSS-Tricks
Consistent Backends and UX: What Can Go Wrong?
12.3.2020
Article Series
Why should you care?
What can go wrong?
What are the barriers to adoption? (Coming soon)
How do new algorithms help? (Coming soon)
In the previous article, we explained what strong (vs. eventual) consistency is. This article is the second part of a series where we explain how...
Careful with Nested `display: grid; height: 100%;`
11.3.2020
It's not every day you can feel CSS be slow at something. Reddit user jgbbrd discovered nesting grid containers that all have 100% height can cause many-seconds of rendering delay. Probably not something you'll ever have to worry about, but still, interesting. From the comments:
What a funny...
How to Make a Line Chart With CSS
11.3.2020
Line,  bar, and pie charts are the bread and butter of dashboards and are the basic components of any data visualization toolkit. Sure, you can use SVG or a JavaScript chart library like Chart.js or a complex tool like D3 to create those charts, but what if you don't want to load yet another...
Sass !default and themeable design systems
11.3.2020
This is a great blog post from Brad Frost where he walks us through an interesting example. Let’s say we’re making a theme and we have some Sass like this:
.c-text-input {
background-color: $form-background-color;
padding: 10px
}
If the $form-background-color variable isn’t defined then...
Fluid Width Video
11.3.2020
IN A WORLD of responsive and fluid layouts on the web, ONE MEDIA TYPE stands in the way of perfect harmony: video. There are lots of ways in which video can be displayed on your site. You might be self-hosting the video and presenting it via the HTML5 <video tag. You might...
Block Links Are a Pain (and Maybe Just a Bad Idea)
10.3.2020
As we noted in our complete guide, you can put an <a href=""> link around whatever chunks of HTML you like. Let's call that a "block link." Like you are wanting to link up an entire "Card" of content because it makes a big clickable target.
<a href="/article/"<!-- display: block;...