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Working with Attributes on DOM Elements
30.8.2019
The DOM is just a little weird about some things, and the way you deal with attributes is no exception. There are a number of ways to deal with the attributes on elements. By attributes, I mean things like the id in <div id="cool"></div>. Sometimes you need to set them. Sometimes...
How much specificity do @rules have, like @keyframes and @media?
31.7.2019
I got this question the other day. My first thought is: weird question! Specificity is about selectors, and at-rules are not selectors, so... irrelevant?
To prove that, we can use the same selector inside and outside of an at-rule and see if it seems to affect specificity.
body {
background:...
Position Sticky and Table Headers
13.7.2019
You can't position: sticky; a <thead>. Nor a <tr>. But you can sticky a <th>, which means you can make sticky headers inside a regular ol' <table>. This is tricky stuff, because if you didn't know this weird quirk, it would be hard to blame you. It makes way more...
Drawing Realistic Clouds with SVG and CSS
13.6.2019
Greek mythology tells the story of Zeus creating the cloud nymph, Nephele. Like other Greek myths, this tale gets pretty bizarre and X-rated. Here’s a very abridged, polite version.
Nephele, we are told, was created by Zeus in the image of his own beautiful wife. A mortal meets Nephele, falls...
Everything You Need to Know About Date in JavaScript
11.6.2019
Date is weird in JavaScript. It gets on our nerves so much that we reach for libraries (like Date-fns and Moment) the moment (ha!) we need to work with date and time.
But we don't always need to use libraries. Date can actually be quite simple if you know what to watch out for. In this article...
Naming things to improve accessibility
2.5.2019
I like the this wrap-up statement from Hidde de Vries:
In modern browsers, our markup becomes an accessibility tree that ultimately informs what our interface looks like to assistive technologies. It doesn’t matter as much whether you’ve written this markup:
in a .html file
in Twig, Handlebars...
Blobs!
21.2.2019
I was recently a guest editor for an issue of Bizarro Devs. It's a great newsletter! Go sign up! I put in a bunch of links around blobs. Like those weird squishy random shapes that are so "in" right now. Here are those links as well. I'm always a fan of publishing stuff I write ;)
Blobs! Blobs...
More Like position: tricky;
4.2.2019
I rather like position: sticky;. It has practical use cases. I think of things like keeping a table of contents in a sidebar of a long article, but as a fairly simple implementation and without risk of overlapping things in awkward ways. But Elad Shechter is right here: it's not used that much...
Git Checkout at Previous Timeframe
9.1.2019
In the past I’ve blogged about checking out branches created on a specific date as well as sorting git branches by date, but one frequent usage of git and dates is checking out a commit at a given time in the past. For example, I often say “Weird, this feature was working a month...
Stuff you can do with CSS pointer events
27.7.2018
Martijn Cuppens (the same fella with the very weird div!) has some more irresistible CSS trickery. Three of the examples are about making a child element trigger an event on a parent element (almost like the magic that is :focus-within).
Here's how I reasoned it out to myself:
You know how if...
Collective #436
26.7.2018
Page Lifecycle API * Keyframes * Rockstar * Terminalizer * Malvid * Callback Exercises * DOM-wait * Pure CSS Stack * Weird things variable fonts can do
Collective #436 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Did you know that style and script tags can be set to display: block?
25.7.2018
The other night, Amit Patel mentioned that you can set script tags in HTML to display: block with CSS and then edit that code inline with the contentEditable attribute. This means that you can then see it all update live in the browser as you type. Shortly after, Marius Gundersen replied that...
Weird things variable fonts can do
20.7.2018
I tend to think of variable fonts as a font format in which a single font file is capable of displaying type at near-infinite variations of things like boldness, width, and slantyness. In my experience, that's a common use case. Just check out many of the interactive demos over...
Better rendering for variable fonts
26.6.2018
I was messing around with a variable font the other day and noticed this weird rendering issue in the latest version of Chrome where certain parts of letterforms were clipping into each other in a really weird way. Thankfully, though, Stephen Nixon has come to the rescue with a temporary hack...
CSS Environment Variables
4.5.2018
We were all introduced to the env() function in CSS when all that drama about "The Notch" and the iPhone X was going down. The way that Apple landed on helping us move content away from those "unsafe" areas was to provide us essentially hard-coded variables to use:
padding:
...