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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;...
Considerations When Choosing Fonts for a Multilingual Website
10.3.2020
As a front-end developer working for clients all over the world, I've always struggled to deal with multilingual websites — especially cases where both right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR) are used. That said, I’ve learned a few things along the...
Make Yourself a Little API With Netlify Functions
10.3.2020
Here's an example of a nice little use case for cloud functions. Glitch has this great package of friendly words. Say you wanted to randomly generate "happy-elephant" or "walking-tree", and you need to do that on your website in JavaScript. Well, this package is pretty big (~200 KB), necessarily...
Negative Margins
9.3.2020
PPK digs into the subject, which he found woefully undercovered in web tech documentation. Our entry doesn't mention them at all, which I'll aim to fix.
Agree on this situation:
This is by far the most common use case for negative margins. You give a container a padding so that its contents have...
I Pressed ⌘B. You Wouldn’t Believe What Happened Next
9.3.2020
This talk by Marcin Wichary is — beyond both enthusiastic and outstanding — all about the complexity of UI design, typography, and the lengths his team at Figma has gone to make sure that doing something as simple as selecting a font from a dropdown does what you expect it to.
I’d recommend this...
Adventures in CSS Semi-Transparency Land
9.3.2020
Recently, I was asked to make some tweaks to a landing page and, among the things I found in the code, there were two semitransparent overlays — both with the same RGB values for the background-color — on top of an image. Something like this:
<img src='myImage.jpg'/>
<div...
Use a:visited in your CSS stylesheet
9.3.2020
Evert Pot:
Unfortunately, when setting a new color (e.g. a { color: #44F }) the ‘purple visited link’ feature also gets disabled. I think this is a shame, as there’s so many instances where you’re going through a list of links and want to see what you’ve seen before.
The 2 examples I ran into...
Geoff’s Redesign Posts
9.3.2020
I love it when people redesign "in the open" and write about it. I'd just like to shout out to our own Geoff who has been doing this for 3 months now. He started in late December last year. He's been sharing stuff like his dev tooling choices, considering performance, considering accessibility...
Google Fonts + Variable Fonts
7.3.2020
I see Google Fonts rolled out a new design (Tweet). Compared to the last big redesign, this feels much more iterative. I can barely tell the difference really, except it's blue instead of red and this one pretty rad checkbox: Show only variable fonts.
An option to only show variable fonts is...
What to Use Instead of Number Inputs
6.3.2020
You might reach for <input type="number> when you're, you know, trying to collect a number in a form. But it's got all sorts of issues. For one, sometimes what you want kinda looks like a number, but isn't one (like how a credit card number has spaces), because it's really just a string...
Currying in CSS
6.3.2020
Funny timing on this I was just looking at the website for Utopia (which is a responsive type project which I hate to admit I don't fully understand) and I came across some CSS they show off that looked like this:
:root {
--fluid-max-negative: (1 / var(--fluid-max-ratio)...