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Google’s Technical Writing Guide
3.4.2020
It’s good!
I’ve written up my advice (sprinkled with great advice from others), but this is way more straightforward nuts-and-bolts training on technical writing. It’s structured like an actual course, with exercises along the way.
I’m far from an expert here. But between...
Accessibility Links
2.4.2020
Austin Gil has kicked off the first in a five-part series about “HTML Forms Right” and to starts with semantics. It’s talking to the “we build our front-ends with JavaScript” crowd. The first block of code is an example of an Ajax form submission where the data...
typespecimens.io
2.4.2020
If you’re looking for a new typeface for that side project of yours then here’s a great website by John D. Jameson that collects a bunch of the latest type specimen websites. Everything is on display here, from the daring and bold, to those that are a bit more professional and reserved.
Not only...
Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated?
2.4.2020
The internet has been around for a long while, and over time we’ve changed the way we think about web design. Many old techniques and ways of doing things have gotten phased out as newer and better alternatives have been created, and we say that they have been deprecated.
Deprecated. It’s a word...
Rethinking Code Comments
2.4.2020
Justin Duke asks if treating code comments like footnotes could help us understand the code in a file better. In his mockup, all the comments are hidden by default and require a click to reveal:
What a neat idea! Justin’s design reminds me of the way that Instapaper treated inline...
Web Performance Checklist
2.4.2020
The other day, I realized that web performance is an enormous topic covering so very much — from minimizing assets to using certain file formats, it can be an awful lot to keep in mind while building a website. It’s certainly far too much for me to remember!
So I made a web performance checklist....
An Annotated Docker Config for Front-End Web Development
2.4.2020
Andrew Welch sings the praises of using Docker containers for local dev environments:
Here are the advantages of Docker for me:
• Each application has exactly the environment it needs to run, including specific versions of any of the plumbing needed to get it to work (PHP, MySQL...
Cloudinary Studio
2.4.2020
I knew that Cloudinary worked with video as well as images but, the other day, I was curious if Cloudinary offered a video player embed just like other video hosts do (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, etc). Like an <iframe> that comes with a special player.
I was curious because, as much as...
Performant Expandable Animations: Building Keyframes on the Fly
1.4.2020
Animations have come a long way, continuously providing developers with better tools. CSS Animations, in particular, have defined the ground floor to solve the majority of uses cases. However, there are some animations that require a little bit more work.
You probably know that animations should...
Let a website be a worry stone
1.4.2020
Ethan Marcotte just redesigned his website and wrote about how the process was a distraction from the difficult things that are going on right now. Adding new features to your blog or your portfolio, tidying up performance issues, and improving things bit by bit can certainly relieve a lot...
How to build a bad design system
31.3.2020
I didn’t realize this until it was far too late, but one of the biggest mistakes that’s made on a design systems team is a common mismanagement issue: there are too many people in a meeting and they have too many dang opinions.
Is there a conversation about the color of your buttons that’s taking...
Max Stoiber’s Strong Opinion About Margins
31.3.2020
Going with that title instead of the classic developer clickbait version Max used. ;)
We should ban margin from our components.
Don’t use margin?! This thing I’ve been doing my entire career and don’t have any particular problems with?!
Well, that’s not exactly Max’s...
APIs and Authentication on the Jamstack
31.3.2020
The first “A” in the Jamstack stands for “APIs” and is a key contributor to what makes working with static sites so powerful. APIs give developers the freedom to offload complexity and provide avenues for including dynamic functionality to an otherwise static site. Often, accessing an API requires...
Wide Gamut Color in CSS with Display-P3
31.3.2020
Here’s something I’d never heard of before: Display-P3 support in CSS Color Module Level 4 spec. This is a new color profile supported by certain displays and it introduces a much wider range of colors that we can choose from.
Right now the syntax looks something like this in CSS:
header...
RSS Stuff
31.3.2020
Laura Kalbag wrote How to read RSS in 2020. This would be a nice place to send someone curious about RSS: what it is, what it’s for, and how you can start using it as a reader. I like this callout, too:
Sometimes the content is just an excerpt, encouraging you to read the rest of the content...
gqless
30.3.2020
This is so cool. I mean, GraphQL is already cool. It’s very satisfying to write an understandable-looking query for whatever you want and then use that data in templates.
But what if you didn’t have to write the query at all? What if you just wrote the templates pretending you already...
4 CSS Grid Properties (and One Value) for Most of Your Layout Needs
30.3.2020
CSS Grid provides us with a powerful layout system for websites. The CSS-Tricks guide gives you a comprehensive overview of Grid’s properties with layout examples. What we’re going to do here is a reverse approach to show you the smallest possible set of grid properties you need to know to meet...
How They Fit Together: Transform, Translate, Rotate, Scale, and Offset
30.3.2020
Firefox 72 was first out of the gate with "independent transforms." That is, instead of having to combine transforms together, like:
.el {
transform: rotate(10deg) scale(0.95) translate(10px, 10px);
}
...we can do:
.el {
rotate: 10deg;
scale: 0.95;
translate: 10px 10px;
}
That's extremely...
Creating a Pencil Effect in SVG
28.3.2020
Scott Turner, who has an entire blog "Exploring procedural generation and display of fantasy maps", gets into why vector graphics seems on these surface why it would be bad for the look of a pencil stroke:
Something like this pencil stroke would require many tens of thousands of different...
How to use CSS Scroll Snap
27.3.2020
Nada Rifki demonstrates the scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-alignCSS properties. I like that the demo shows that the items in the scrolling container can be different sizes. It is the edges of those children that matter, not some fixed snapping distance.
I like Max Kohler's coverage...