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Chapter 2: Browsers
12.8.2020
Previously in web history…
Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates the technologies behind the web — HTML, HTTP, and the URL which blend hypertext with the Internet — with a small team at CERN. He convinces the higher-ups in the organizations to put the web in the public domain so anyone can...
Practical Use Cases for JavaScript’s closest() Method
12.8.2020
Have you ever had the problem of finding the parent of a DOM node in JavaScript, but aren’t sure how many levels you have to traverse up to get to it? Let’s look at this HTML for instance:
<div data-id="123"<buttonClick me</button</div
That’s pretty straightforward, right? Say...
Halfmoon: A Bootstrap Alternative with Dark Mode Built In
11.8.2020
I recently launched the first production version of Halfmoon, a front-end framework that I have been building for the last few months. This is a short introductory post about what the framework is, and why I decided to build it.
The elevator pitch
Halfmoon is a front-end framework with a...
Don’t Wait! Mock the API
10.8.2020
Today we have a loose coupling between the front end and the back end of web applications. They are usually developed by separate teams, and keeping those teams and the technology in sync is not easy. To solve part of this problem, we can “fake” the API server that the back end tech...
Nailing the Perfect Contrast Between Light Text and a Background Image
7.8.2020
Have you ever come across a site where light text is sitting on a light background image? If you have, you’ll know how difficult that is to read. A popular way to avoid that is to use a transparent overlay. But this leads to an important question: Just how transparent should that overlay...
More Control Over CSS Borders With background-image
7.8.2020
You can make a typical CSS border dashed or dotted. For example:
.box {
border: 1px dashed black;
border: 3px dotted red;
}
You don’t have all that much control over how big or long the dashes or gaps are. And you certainly can’t give the dashes slants, fading, or animation!...
Every Website is an Essay
7.8.2020
Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color...
font-weight: 300 considered harmful
7.8.2020
Tomáš Janoušek:
Many web pages these days set font-weight: 300 in their stylesheet. With DejaVu Sans as my preferred font, this results in very thin and light text that is hard to read, because for some reason the “DejaVu Sans ExtraLight” variant (weight 200) is being used...
HTML for Subheadings and Headings
6.8.2020
Let’s say you have a double heading situation going on. A little one on top of a big one. It comes up, I dunno, a billion times a day, I’d say. What HTML do you go for? Dare I say, it depends? But have you considered all the options? And how those options play out semantically...
TypeScript, Minus TypeScript
6.8.2020
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last several years (and let’s face it, hiding under a rock sometimes feels like the right thing to do), you’ve probably heard of and likely used TypeScript. TypeScript is a syntactical superset of JavaScript that adds — as its name suggests — typing to...
Chapter 1: Birth
5.8.2020
Tim Berners-Lee is fascinated with information. It has been his life’s work. For over four decades, he has sought to understand how it is mapped and stored and transmitted. How it passes from person to person. How the seeds of information become the roots of dramatic change. It is so fundamental...
Computed Values: More Than Meets the Eye
5.8.2020
Browser DevTools are indispensable for us front end developers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Computed tab, a small corner of the DevTools panel that shows us big things, like how relative CSS values are resolved. We’ll also see how inheritance fits into the browser’s...
Making Sense of react-spring
4.8.2020
Animation is one of the trickier things to get right with React. In this post, I’ll try to provide the introduction to react-spring I wish I had when I first started out, then dive into some interesting use cases. While react-spring isn’t the only animation library for React, it’s one of the more...
Jetpack CRM
4.8.2020
About a year ago, Automattic bought up Zero BS CRM. The thinking at the time was that it could be rebranded into the Jetpack suite and, well, that happened.
CRM meaning “Customer Relationship Management” if you’re like me and this is a little outside your sphere of everyday...
The Making of: Netlify’s Million Devs SVG Animation Site
3.8.2020
The following article captures the process of building the Million Developers microsite for Netlify. This project was built by a few folks and we’ve captured some parts of the process of building it here- focusing mainly on the animation aspects, in case any are helpful to others building...
10 modern layouts in 1 line of CSS
31.7.2020
Una doing an amazing job of showing just how (dare I say it?) easy CSS layout has gotten. There is plenty to learn, but what you learn makes sense, and once you have, it’s quite empowering.
The demos are all together here.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink… Read article...
A Look at What’s New in Chrome DevTools in 2020
31.7.2020
I’m excited to share some of the newer features in Chrome DevTools with you. There’s a brief introduction below, and then we’ll cover many of the new DevTools features. We’ll also look at what’s happening in some other browsers. I keep up with this stuff, as I create Dev Tips, the largest...
A Lightweight Masonry Solution
31.7.2020
Back in May, I learned about Firefox adding masonry to CSS grid. Masonry layouts are something I’ve been wanting to do on my own from scratch for a very long time, but have never known where to start. So, naturally, I checked the demo and then I had a lightbulb moment when I understood...
Spotting a Trend
31.7.2020
There are tons of smokin’ hot websites out there, with an equal or greater number of talented designers and developers who make them. The web is awesome like that and encourages that sort of creativity.
Even so, it amazes me that certain traits find their way into things. I mean, it makes...
SVG Title vs. HTML Title Attribute
30.7.2020
You know the title attribute? I can do this:
<div title="The Title"I'm a div with a `title`
</div
And now if I’m on a device with a mouse pointer and hover the cursor over that element, I get…
Which, uh, I guess is something. I sometimes use it for things like putting...