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CSS Grid in IE: CSS Grid and the New Autoprefixer
4.7.2018
In Part 1 of this series, I debunked a few misconceptions that many people have around the Internet Explorer (IE) implementation of CSS grid. This article builds on that knowledge. It would be best to go back and read that article first if you haven’t already.
Today I’m going to be tackling...
Clearfix: A Lesson in Web Development Evolution
3.7.2018
The web community has, for the most part, been a spectacularly open place. As such, a lot of the best development techniques happen right out in the open, on blogs and in forums, evolving as they’re passed around and improved. I thought it might be fun (and fascinating) to actually follow this...
One-Offs
2.7.2018
There is this sentiment that you don't design the homepage of a site first. For most sites, it's an anomaly. It's unlike any other page and not something to base the patterns you use for the rest of the site or help inform other pages.
You might call it a one-off.1
One-offs are OK! A world without...
CSS Grid in IE: Debunking Common IE Grid Misconceptions
2.7.2018
This is the first in a three-part series all about how to use CSS grid in a way that will work not only in modern browsers but also in Internet Explorer (IE). Imagine writing CSS grid code without having to write a fallback layout! Many of us think that this is some far off future that is many...
Fitting Text to a Container
29.6.2018
There are a number of ways to go about putting some text in a container and having it size itself to fill that container. There are different technologies we can use and different considerations to think about. Let us count the ways.
Magic Number it with viewport units
If you set type with...
Empower Through Web Development
28.6.2018
As a person with a disability, I appreciate the web and modern-day computing for their many affordances. The web is a great place to work and share and connect. You can make a living, build your dream, and speak your mind.
It’s not easy, though. Beginners struggling with the box model often take...
Vue + TypeScript: A Match Made in Your Code Editor
27.6.2018
Vue is so hot right now and I’ve been thinking of doing a serious project with it since quite a while, so when the opportunity popped up, I hopped in. But there was a little problem — one of the requirements of the project was to write it in TypeScript. At first, I was super stressed about...
Handling Errors with Error Boundary
26.6.2018
Thinking and building in React involves approaching application design in chunks, or components. Each part of your application that performs an action can and should be treated as a component. In fact, React is component-based and, as Tomas Eglinkas recently wrote, we should leverage that concept...
Drawing Images with CSS Gradients
25.6.2018
What I mean by "CSS images" is images that are created using only HTML elements and CSS. They look as if they were SVGs drawn in Adobe Illustrator but they were made right in the browser. Some techniques I’ve seen used are tinkering with border radii, box shadows, and sometimes clip-path. You...
Animate Calligraphy with SVG
22.6.2018
From time to time at Stackoverflow, the question pops up whether there is an equivalent to the stroke-dashoffset technique for animating the SVG stroke that works for the fill attribute. But upon closer inspection, what the questions are really trying to ask is something like this:
I have something...
Balancing Time
22.6.2018
I first wrote this post four years ago. I put it on a blog that no longer exists. Funnily enough, I still refer to it myself, so I figured it might be best served in a place where other people can see it. I've made only a few minor tweaks to the original content. A lot about how I work has changed...
Advanced Document Conversions with Filestack
22.6.2018
You might know Filestack from being an incredible service to add file uploading, storage, and management to your own web apps.
There is another thing Filestack can do for you: convert documents into different formats.
For one thing, it can manipulate documents. Take images. Perhaps you would...
Using Custom Fonts With SVG in an Image Tag
21.6.2018
When we produce a PNG image, we use an <img> tag or a CSS background, and that's about it. It is dead simple and guaranteed to work.
PNG is way simpler to use in HTML than SVG
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for SVG, despite its many advantages. Although you're spoiled for choices...
What is SVG good for?
21.6.2018
Y'all probably wouldn't be surprised if I told you it's pretty awesome for icons, and icon systems. SVG icon systems can, and perhaps should be quite easy. I'm a fan of just inlining those suckers, particularly when they are pretty simple.
But what else?
Logos is a classic example! A lot...
Centering: The Newest Coolest Way vs. The Oldest Coolest Way
20.6.2018
This isn't a comprehensive guide to centering things. We have that!
This is just a little observation about old and new. One of the trickier things related to centering in CSS is when you need to center both vertically and horizontally and you don't know the width or height of what you...
Don’t just copy the @font-face out of Google Fonts URLs
19.6.2018
I don't think this is an epidemic or anything, but I've seen it done a few times and even advocated for. This is what I mean...
You go to Google Fonts and pick a font like Open Sans, and it gives you either a <link> or an @import with a URL there in which to ready this font for usage...
The Four Big Ways Jetpack Helps with Image Performance
19.6.2018
We've been working with Jetpack around here as a sponsor. It's a great match because as someone with a bunch of self-hosted WordPress sites, Jetpack is one of those no-brainer plugins for me. Jetpack can do a ton of good things for any site in a variety of very different ways. Here's one way...
Building a RSS Viewer With Vue: Part 2
19.6.2018
Welcome to Part 2 of this mini-series on building a RSS viewer with Vue. In the last post, I walked through how I built my demo using Vue.js and Vuetify on the front end and Webtask on the back end. When I built that initial version, I knew it was exactly thatmdash;an "initial" version. I took some...
Here’s the thing about “unused CSS” tools
18.6.2018
There are a lot of tools that aim to help you remove "unused CSS" from your project. Never a week goes by that I don't see a tool for this being shared or promoted. It must strike some kind of perfect chord for some developers. I care about performance, and I know that reducing file sizes is good...
Building a RSS Viewer With Vue: Part 1
18.6.2018
As I explore, learn, and most importantly, play with Vue.js, I've been building different types of apps as a way to get practice with and improve my use of it. A few weeks ago, I was reading about the shut down of Digg's RSS Reader and while great alternatives exist, I thought it would be fun...